Dr. Keith Edward Cantú is a Research Affiliate at the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School. He was previously Lecturer on South Asian Religious Traditions at Harvard Divinity School and a postdoctoral fellow at the center from 2024 to 2025. His interdisciplinary research especially focuses on South Asian yoga, tantra, and Sanskrit and Indic vernacular languages, especially Bengali and Tamil, and on the connected histories of yoga in global esoteric currents. Prior to Harvard, he was Visiting Assistant Professor at St. Lawrence University in upstate New York and has been involved in postdoctoral projects in Germany and Poland.

Keith has been researching Sabhapati Swami and his diagrams since 2012, and has spent over a year in Tamil Nadu engaged in archival and ethnographic research about this swami. His first monograph Like a Tree Universally Spread: Sri Sabhapati Swami and Śivarājayoga was published in 2023 by Oxford University Press. He has also co-edited a volume of Bengali Baul songs and translations, published in 2017 as City of Mirrors: Songs of Lālan Sā̃i, and has authored numerous other articles and chapters on yoga and esotericism-related topics. Current projects include reprinting and translating the collected works and diagrams of Sri Sabhapati Swami and of his gurus as well as a monograph on Bengali musical language worlds.