The conference is organized by participants of the Psychedelics, Neuroscience and Religion Working Group, sponsored by the UC Berkeley Townsend Center for the Humanities. The group has been meeting since Fall 2020 and consists of professors and graduate students from the Graduate Theological Union and UC Berkeley.
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Organizing Team Members
Patricia Kubala is a PhD candidate in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include the anthropology of religion, psychological anthropology and transcultural psychiatry, and the anthropology of the senses. In fieldwork-based projects in Cairo, Egypt and the San Francisco Bay Area, she studies the ways that traditions are taught and transmitted in contexts marked by colonial violence and illegibility within existing legal, ethical, and metaphysical frameworks. Her dissertation, entitled The Medicine World: Psychedelics and the Labor for an Otherwise, explores the revival of interest in psychedelics in contemporary American society.
Emily Pothast is a visual artist, musician, and historian whose research-based practice considers intertwined dynamics of embodied experience, material culture, temporality, politics, and belief. She holds an MFA from the University of Washington and is currently a PhD student in Art and Religion at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, where she is a member of the Psychedelics, Neuroscience and Religion Working Group. She is the co-founder of the musical projects Hair and Space Museum and Midday Veil, a regular contributor to the experimental music magazine The Wire, and the assistant editor of the journal Teaching Theology and Religion.
William (Billy) Roy is a third year Masters of Divinity Student at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, Berkeley, and is also completing his M.A through the Graduate Theological Union, concurrently. He earned a B.A in Theological Studies from Texas Lutheran University in 2017. He will graduate with his M.Div this May, and then begin his M.A dissertation work at the GTU in the Historical and Cultural Studies of Religion department. His areas of interest include mystical theologies, process theology, spiritual practice, death and dying, and biblical studies. He is exploring how the power of personal spiritual transformation can be a tool to help one die well and live generatively.
Michael Simler is a Master's student at the Graduate Theological Union. His research is focused on comparing phenomena in psychedelic experiences and religious/spiritual experiences. The goal of his research is to enrich contemporary discussions regarding the significance of these altered states not only for scientific research and mental/physical health, but also for religious and artistic forms of life.
Dr. Devin Zuber is Associate Professor of American Studies, Religion, & Literature at the Graduate Theological Union (GTU) in Berkeley, and the George F. Dole Professor of Swedenborgian Studies at the GTU’s Center for Swedenborgian Studies. At the GTU he also co- directs Sustainability 360, an incubator for religious studies and the environmental humanities. His last book, A Language of Things (2020) was awarded the 2020 Borsch-Rast Book Prize. He is completing a new book on religion and literature in mid-century American countercultures and co-editing a book of essays about the performance artist Marina Abramović.