Dr. James A. Santucci is a Professor of Comparative Religion at California State University, Fullerton. He is also Adjunct Professor and Co-Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of the West in Rosemead, CA. He received his B.A. degree in history at Iona College in New Rochelle, N.Y., his M.A. degree in Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii (Manoa campus) in Honolulu, and his Ph.D. degree in the Department of Asian Civilizations at the Australian National University (Canberra, Australia). Professor Santucci was a member of both the Religious Studies (now called the Comparative Religion Department) and Linguistics Departments at California State University, Fullerton from 1970 to 1993, after which time he became a full-time member of the Comparative Religion Department. As a member of the Comparative Religion Department, Professor Santucci is primarily responsible for teaching the courses on Buddhism (CPRL 280 and 354), Hinduism (CPRL 347A and B), New Religious Movements (CPRL 370), and World Religions (CPRL 110). He is also responsible for teaching two courses for the Department of Linguistics, Descriptive Linguistics (Linguistics 406) and on occasion Changing Words, a course on etymology (Linguistics 442).

Professor Santucci has authored five books, including An Outline of Vedic Literature and La società teosofica, and over 45 articles. Dr. Santucci was also a contributor to Agni: The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar (vol. 2), edited by Frits Staal.  He is the editor of Theosophical History and Theosophical History Occasional Papers as well as a contributor (the Sanskrit language) to the Intercontinental Dictionary Series, under the editorship of Mary Ritchie Key (University of California, Irvine).  This Dictionary, as the successor to Carl Darling Buck's A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in The Principal Indo-European Languages, seeks to compare all the major languages of the world: classical as well as modern.