Dominic Goodall studied Greek and Latin, then Sanskrit at Pembroke College, Oxford. After finishing his BA (Sanskrit with Pali, 1990), he came to Hamburg for two years to learn medieval Tamil with Professor S.A. Srinivasan. He then returned to Oxford, to Wolfson College, where, under the guidance of Professor Alexis Sanderson, he produced a critical edition of the opening chapters of Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha’s tenth-century commentary on the Kiraṇatantra, which he submitted as a doctoral thesis in 1995 and subsequently published from Pondicherry in 1998. He was attached to the French Institute of Pondicherry as a junior researcher in 1996–1997 before returning to Oxford as Wolfson College Junior Research Fellow of Indology from 1998 to 2000. In 2000, he became a member of the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO, “French School of Asian Studies”). He became Head of the Pondicherry Centre of the EFEO in 2002, where he remained until April 2011.
He is currently a professor (directeur d’études) at the EFEO posted in Paris, where he gives lectures at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and he is co-editor with Dr. Marion Rastelli of the Viennese dictionary of tantric terminology, the Tāntrikābhidhānakośa, and head of the cataloguing of the UNESCO Memory of the World collection of “Śaiva Manuscripts of Pondicherry”.
