2026–27 Transcendentalism Initiative Scholars

Alda Balthrop-Lewis is Associate Professor of Religion at Florida State University. She studies ethics—the norms, principles, relationships, and practices people use in their efforts to live well. In Thoreau's Religion (Cambridge University Press, 2021), she explores questions of environmental justice, demonstrating how Henry David Thoreau's religious practice in Walden enacts the intrinsic connection between his ecological commitments and his political commitments to abolition and labor justice.

Her current book project, Contemplation and Complicity, examines twentieth-century Thoreauvians, particularly the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, and the ways his reading of Thoreau shaped his engagement with the politics of race and environment in the 1960s.

Balthrop-Lewis also supports scholarly publishing as an Associate Editor of Environmental Humanities and as co-editor, with Jonathan Tran, of the American Academy of Religion–sponsored book series Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion, published by Oxford University Press.

Ryan Carr (PhD, Yale University, 2016) studies the cultural histories of American nations. Much of his research focuses on the Indigenous peoples of the Northeastern seaboard and their relationships with the British and US empires.

His first book, Samson Occom: Radical Hospitality in the Native Northeast (Columbia University Press, 2023), examines the life and writings of the Mohegan-Brothertown preacher and political leader Samson Occom.

Another area of his research concerns the history of free speech, understood as a popular tradition rather than a legal doctrine. This is the subject of his current book project, which traces the history of free expression from the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 to the rise of MAGA in the present day.

In addition to teaching courses on the Native Northeast and early American culture, Carr teaches Contemporary Civilization in Columbia University's Core Curriculum. His writing has appeared in journals including Critical Research on Religion, Early American Literature, and The New England Quarterly, as well as in publications including The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and American Affairs.

Kristen Case is a poet and scholar whose books include American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice, Little Arias, Principles of Economics, Henry David Thoreau's Kalendar, and Daphne. She has co-edited several essay collections on American writers and is currently co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau with James Finley. 

Case serves as Executive Director of the Monson Arts Fellowship, a residential arts and humanities program for Pell-eligible college students, and is visiting faculty at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College. She lives in Maine. 

Peter Catapano is an author and editor who has worked at The New York Times since 1998. He is the founding editor of the Times’ philosophy series The Stone, which ran for eleven years, and co-editor of four essay collections. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Frequencies: A Collaborative Genealogy of Spirituality.

Catapano began his career delivering newspapers in his Staten Island neighborhood at age twelve. Before joining The New York Times as a news assistant, he worked as a waiter, bartender, newsroom clerk, middle school science teacher, tutor, and rock drummer. He graduated from Cornell University in 1985 and later studied fiction and poetry at Brooklyn College.

His interests include ambient and experimental music, poetry, improvisation, devotional practice, and the relationship between the natural world and artistic creation. He is currently writing several books—or perhaps one very long one—at a deliberately unhurried pace.

Phyllis Cole is a past fellow of Harvard Divinity School's Women's Studies in Religion Program and currently a Professor Emerita of English, Women's Studies, and American Studies at Penn State Brandywine. She has been an officer or board member of the Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller Societies and participated in their meetings through the years. Much of her work has concentrated on the letters and journals of the Transcendentalists, as both a genre and a source of insight into published works. She is the author of Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History (Oxford University Press, 1998) and co-editor of the essay collection Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism (University of Georgia Press, 2014). Her current work is a study of health issues in Transcendentalist women's private writing.

Simon Cox received his PhD in the Study of Religion from Rice University in 2019 and is the author of The Subtle Body: A Genealogy (Oxford University Press, 2022). He is a Research Fellow at the Esalen Center for Theory and Research and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) at Harvard Divinity School.

His research focuses on the intellectual history of subtle body traditions, with particular attention to the parallel genealogies of the Western concept of energy and the Chinese concept of qi. Bringing together the history of religions, philosophy, and intellectual history, his work explores how these traditions have shaped evolving conceptions of the body, consciousness, and cosmology across Eurasia.

At the CSWR, Cox is developing a dual genealogy of energy and qi, tracing their distinct historical trajectories from Neoplatonism and the Hermetic traditions in the West and from early Chinese philosophy and Daoism in East Asia. By examining both their independent development and their modern convergence, the project illuminates the conceptual foundations of contemporary discussions of religion, science, and embodiment.

Erik Davis is an author, award-winning journalist, and scholar based in San Francisco. He is the author of Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium (MIT Press, 2024), a study of LSD blotter art, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (MIT Press, 2019), Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (Yeti Publishing, 2010), and the cult classic TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (North Atlantic Books, 1998, 2015).  Erik’s scholarly and popular essays on music, technoculture, drugs, and spirituality have appeared in numerous books, magazines, and journals. His writing has been translated into a dozen languages. Davis graduated from Yale University magna cum laude in 1988 and earned his PhD in Religious Studies from Rice University in 2015. He has spoken widely at universities, conferences, retreat centers, and festivals, and has been interviewed by CNN, NPR, the BBC, and the New York Times. He produced the Expanding Mind podcast for a decade and currently writes Burning Shore on Substack. For more information, visit www.techgnosis.com.  

Alice de Galzain is a postdoctoral researcher and former Marie Skłodowska-Curie Seal of Excellence Fellow at Sorbonne Université (2024–2026). She is a Visiting Scholar with the Transcendentalism Initiative at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School for the 2026–27 academic year.

Her book project, tentatively titled Cultivating Feminism: Brook Farm and the American Women’s Movement, examines the feminist subculture that emerged within Transcendentalist utopian communities. She is Associate Editor of The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies and Associate Editor of Margaret Fuller, Periodical and Other Writings (2 vols.), forthcoming in the Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Writings of Margaret Fuller.

Her scholarship has appeared in Transatlantica, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, The Dial, The Concord Saunterer, and Legacy. Her essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller appears in Hawthorne Inside Out (Nanterre UP, 2026), and her forthcoming essay, “Margaret Fuller on Gender and Greek Mythology,” will appear in The History of Platonism in the Modern Age, Vol. V (Cambridge UP).

Rebecca Kneale Gould is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, where she co-directs the Religion, Philosophy, and Environment Focus. Trained in the study of religion, her research explores the intersections of religion, environmental thought, and contemporary spiritual practice in North America.

Gould is the author of At Home in Nature: Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America and co-editor, with Russell C. Powell, of a special issue of the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture examining the legacies of influential environmental writers, including Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, and Rachel Carson. Her recent scholarship has addressed topics including Thoreau and race, ecological traditions in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and the relationship between religion and environmental stewardship.

She also serves as Senior Research Associate for The BTS Center and has contributed to documentary projects on nature, spirituality, and the life and legacy of Henry David Thoreau.

Lewis Hyde is a poet, essayist, translator, cultural critic, and MacArthur Fellow whose work explores the public life of the imagination, artistic practice, and the cultural commons. He is the author of The Gift (Random House, 1983), a landmark work that illuminates and defends the noncommercial dimensions of artistic practice. His other books include Trickster Makes This World, Common as Air, A Primer on Forgetting, and the poetry collection This Error Is the Sign of Love.

Hyde has also published two volumes of translations of Nobel laureate Vicente Aleixandre's poetry and is the editor of On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg and The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau. He served as director of undergraduate creative writing at Harvard University and later as the Richard L. Thomas Professor in Creative Writing at Kenyon College until his retirement in 2018.

He earned a bachelor's degree in sociology from the University of Minnesota and a master's degree in comparative literature from the University of Iowa.

Rochelle L. Johnson is the Bernie McCain Chair in the Humanities at the College of Idaho, where she teaches writing and environmental humanities. She also holds the 2026 Robert Frost Chair at the Bread Loaf School of English, where she teaches literature and creative writing. 

A creative writer and scholar of American environmental thought, Johnson is the author of Passions for Nature: Nineteenth-Century America's Aesthetics of Alienation and co-editor of several volumes, including Thoreau in an Age of Crisis. Her creative and scholarly work has appeared widely in academic and literary journals and in collections such as Thoreauvian Modernities and Thoreau Beyond Borders. 

Johnson's research has been supported by fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Beinecke Library, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. A former president of both the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment and The Thoreau Society, she currently chairs the Award Committee for the Thoreau Prize in Nature Writing. 

Elise Lemire is Professor of English and Global Literatures at Purchase College, SUNY. Her research focuses on race, memory, and memorialization in the northeastern United States, with particular attention to Concord, Massachusetts, the shared birthplace of the nation and Henry David Thoreau.

Lemire is the author of "Miscegenation": Making Race in America (2002), Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts (2009), and Battleground Vietnam: The 1971 March on Lexington, Concord, and Boston (2021), all published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. She was recently awarded the Walter Harding Distinguished Achievement Award by the Thoreau Society. Her current work focuses on collaborating with community stakeholders in Concord to make Black and veteran histories more visible.

Nicholas E Low received his PhD in the Study of Religion from Harvard University in 2023. He is currently an affiliate at the CSWR, and a research fellow at the Esalen Institute’s Center for Theory and Research. His work seeks to illuminate the religious and theological imaginary animating the tradition known as “continental philosophy,” focused especially on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and its reception in the 20th and 21st centuries. His first book, Nietzsche, Dionysus, and Deification of Life, forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2026, treats the motif of Dionysian deification in Nietzsche’s writing, questioning how contemporary definitions of the concepts of both philosophy and religion have obscured the reception of Nietzsche’s thought, and arguing that Nietzsche’s project is best understood as an exemplary pursuit of deification. 

His current project traces the emergence of a distinctly modern vision of “Nature” in European romanticism and vitalism, through philosophical anthropology and into American Transcendentalism and post-Nietzschean philosophy. The project inquires both into the historical conditions under which a peculiar vision of humanity's place within nature arises and investigates contemporary cultural sites where it is being either openly or subtly inhabited. He has written recently on how Nietzschean philosophy interacts with environmentalism, theories of ontological entanglement, techno-futurist visions of the superhuman, and Transcendentalism.     

James Marcus is the author of Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson (2024). His other books include Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot-Com Juggernaut (2004), as well as seven translations from the Italian, most recently Giacomo Casanova's The Duel (2010). He also edited and introduced Second Read: Writers Look Back at Classic Works of Reportage (2012). His essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The Times Literary Supplement, The Threepenny Review, The New Statesman, The Atlantic, and other publications. He was awarded a 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship for his current project, a multigenerational narrative of family life. A former editor of Harper's Magazine, he lives in New York City and teaches at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Megan Marshall is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), and The Peabody Sisters (Mariner, 2006), a Pulitzer Prize finalist.  She is the Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor Emerita of nonfiction writing at Emerson College, a past president of the Society of American Historians, and a recipient of the BIO Award, the highest honor given by the Biographers International Organization.  Her most recent book is After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart (Mariner, 2025). 

Lydia Moland is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Philosophy at Colby College. She is the author of Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life (2022), a biography of abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. Her writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and American Scholar, among other publications. She is also the author of books on classical German philosophy and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of American and British Women Philosophers in the Nineteenth Century (2025). She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Academy in Berlin. In 2025, she was a Fulbright Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin. She is currently working on a group biography of interwar pacifists, provisionally titled Pacifist Women at War: Four Paths to Peace.

Scott L. Pratt is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. His research and teaching focus on American philosophy, including pragmatism, feminist philosophy, philosophies of race, and Indigenous philosophy, as well as philosophy of education and the history of logic.

Pratt is the author of Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy and Logic: Inquiry, Argument and Order, and coauthor of American Philosophies from Wounded Knee to the Present. He has also co-edited several volumes and published widely on pragmatism, pluralism, logic, and Indigenous North American philosophy.

His current projects include Absolute Pragmatism; a co-authored history of natural logic; and Against Critical Reason: Logic, Colonization, and Indigenous Philosophy, which examines the role of logic in the colonization of North America and its implications for contemporary anti-colonial and decolonial thought.

Susan Shumaker is a producer and story developer with Florentine Films and Ewers Brothers Productions, under the leadership of director Ken Burns. She recently served as story producer on the documentary film Henry David Thoreau, which aired on PBS in March 2026. With support from the Center for the Study of World Religions' (CSWR) Transcendentalism Initiative, she is currently developing a media project exploring the spiritual roots of the modern environmental and social justice movements.

Susan joined Florentine in 2002 and has been an integral member of the Emmy Award-winning teams behind The War, The National Parks, The Dust Bowl, Country Music, and, most recently, The American Buffalo.

Before joining Florentine, Susan worked at Harvard University with Diana Eck as the first coordinator of the Pluralism Project and later as a curator at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Her introduction to filmmaking came through her work producing digital multimedia, including the award-winning educational CD-ROM On Common Ground: World Religions in America. She lives on a farm in West Virginia with her family, three quirky cats, and a very loving golden retriever.

Mona Simpson is the author of the novels Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, Off Keck Road, My Hollywood, Casebook, and Commitment. Born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, she moved to Los Angeles as a teenager. She studied poetry at the University of California, Berkeley, worked as a journalist, and earned an MFA from Columbia University. While in graduate school, she published her first short stories in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, and Mademoiselle. She later served as an editor at The Paris Review while completing Anywhere But Here.

Simpson has received numerous honors, including a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Prize, the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

She lives in Santa Monica, California, with her two children and Bartleby the dog.

Ileene Smith is Editor at Large at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Editorial Director of Jewish Lives, published by Yale University Press. She is the recipient of the PEN/Roger Klein Award and BIO International Award for Editorial Excellence, and a fellow of both the New York Institute for the Humanities and Berkeley College at Yale University. Smith serves on the board of The Paris Review.

Rebecca Solnit is a writer, historian, and activist and the author of more than 25 books, including The Beginning Comes After the End (2026), Orwell's Roses, Hope in the Dark, Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, and A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. A regular contributor to The Guardian, she also writes the newsletter Meditations in an Emergency and serves on the boards of Oil Change International and Third Act, the U.S. organization for climate activists over the age of 60. A graduate of California's public education system, she attended public schools from kindergarten through graduate school.

Christopher Volpe is an artist, writer, and educator based in New Hampshire. His paintings explore themes of mortality, mysticism, and the environmental consequences of contemporary consumer culture. He is represented by Georges Bergès Gallery in New York City.

Volpe's work is held in the permanent collections of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, the Whistler House Museum of Art, Smith College, Ege University in Turkey, and the University of New Hampshire. His honors and awards include serving as the inaugural artist-in-residence at Harvard Divinity School, as well as support from the Saint Botolph Club Foundation, MASS MoCA's Assets for Artists program, and the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts.

Trained in poetry, English, and philosophy at the University of New Hampshire and Stony Brook University, Volpe has taught painting, writing, literature, mythology, and art history. He also writes regularly about art and artists.

Laura Dassow Walls is Professor Emerita at the University of Notre Dame, where she taught nineteenth-century American literature, particularly the American Transcendentalists, and the history and theory of ecological thought. Previously she taught at Lafayette College and the University of South Carolina. She has authored numerous essays on Thoreau, Emerson, Alexander von Humboldt, and related figures; her book Henry David Thoreau: A Life (Chicago, 2017) received Phi Beta Kappa's Christian Gauss Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Biography. Her other books include the award-winning Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (2009); Emerson's Life in Science: The Culture of Truth (2003); and Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (1995). She now lives near Seattle, Washington, where she is working on a literary biography of the contemporary American writer Barry Lopez.

Lydia Willsky-Ciollo is a historian of American religion whose research focuses on religious movements in the Early Republic and antebellum United States, with particular attention to Unitarians, Transcendentalists, and new religious movements. She is Professor of Religious Studies and Director of American Studies at Fairfield University.

Her research explores religious authority, theology and Henry David Thoreau, New England religious thought, and liberal Christian women's reform movements. In her capacity as a local scholar and participant in the Transcendentalism Initiative, she is exploring nineteenth-century Transcendentalist-Unitarian and social reformer Caroline Dall's children's book series, Patty Gray's Journey to the Cotton Islands, which is part of a larger project on the life and works of Dall.

Willsky-Ciollo received her PhD from Vanderbilt University in 2013, her Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School in 2007, and her bachelor's degree from Connecticut College in 2005. Before joining the faculty at Fairfield University, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Whittier College and an Adjunct Professor at Connecticut College.

Peter Wirzbicki is Associate Professor of American History at Princeton University. His first book, Fighting for the Higher Law: Black and White Transcendentalists against Slavery, examines the intellectual and personal relationships between radical abolitionism and New England Transcendentalism. 

His current research explores the intellectual history of Reconstruction, with a focus on how Americans understood democracy, rights, sovereignty, and suffrage in the years following the Civil War.