Eugénie Henderson was Lecturer in South East Asian languages and SOAS and Head of the Department 1960-1966. She served as Chair of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain from 1977 to 1980, and President of the Philological Society from 1984 to 1988.
Ulla Johansen was an Estonian-born German ethnologist. She was director of the ethnology department at the University of Cologne from 1973 to 1990.
Betty Heimarin studied Sanskrit and cultural epistemology in Kiel, Heidelberg, Gottingen and Bonn. In 1919, Heimann received her PhD from Kiel University where her thesis was on Upaniad Bhaya. She emigrated to England in 1933 and taught at the University of London. From 1945 to 1949 Heimann was a professor at the University of Ceylon in Colombo, Ceylon, founding the Department of Sanskrit at the university.
Her book, Indian and Western Philosophy: A Study in Contrasts (1937) is based on the Forlong Fund Lectures delivered under the auspices of the Royal Asiatic Society. The Society also published her work on the Sanskrit langauge entitled The Significance of Prefixes in Sanskrit Philosophical Terminology in 1951.
Ruth Gaevernitz was a long-time friend and collaborator of Betty Heimann. She co-edited Facets of Indian Thought, a collection of essays by Betty Heimann which was published posthumously in 1964.
Christopher J. Fuller is an emeritus professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics and a Fellow of the British Academy. In 1976, Fuller started conducting field research in the temple of Madurai in Tamilnadu, southeast India, which is dedicated to the Hindu goddess Minakshi. Fuller has also researched and written extensively on popular Hinduism and Hindu nationalism, the caste system, the anthropology of the state and other topics.
Stuart N. Wolfenden was a linguist and scholar in Tibeto-Burman dialects. He joined the Royal Asiatic Society in 1928 and his book Outlines of Tibeto-Burman Linguistic Morphology was published by the Society in the Prize Publication Fund Series in 1929.
Freya Stark was born on 31 January 1893 in Paris. She taught herself Latin and read avidly before being educated at Bedford College and the School of Oriental and Asian Studies, London. She learnt Arabic and Persian. In World War One she served as a VAD. She first travelled to the Middle East in 1927 and by 1931 she had completed three dangerous treks into the wilderness of western Iran, parts of which no Westerner had ever visited, and had located the long-fabled Valleys of the Assassins. In 1935 she travelled to the Hadhramaut, the hinterland of southern Arabia.
During World War Two she joined the British Ministry of Information helping to spread propaganda to persuade Arabs to support the allies. In 1947, at the age of 54, she married Stewart Perowne, a British administrator and historian. The couple had no children, and separated in 1952 (but did not divorce). After the war she travelled in Turkey and Afghanistan. She wrote extensively about her travels.
Stark was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 1972 New Year's Honours. She died at Asolo on 9 May 1993, a few months after her hundredth birthday.