Director Charles Stang Welcomes the 2024-2025 Academic Year

Dear colleagues and friends of the CSWR,

I hope you have enjoyed a restful and restorative summer. We here at the CSWR are eager to share with you the exciting research and programming we have planned for the fall semester. I would like to thank my colleagues at the CSWR—Bhaswar, Chris, Deborah, Isabel, Jeffrey, Laurie, Paul, Sarah, Rachael, and especially Gosia (the Center’s Executive Director)—for their tireless effort and enthusiasm, and for their kind collegiality. I count myself lucky to work with such an amazing team. Needless to say, none of this would be possible without them

We are delighted to announce our new cohort of researchers, poets, artists, students, and program associates—our largest ever, at 39 and counting! A special welcome to the new members of our community: Andrea, Anya, Carole, Christine, Elitza, Elliot, Eugenia, Frederique, Helen, Maia, Mariano, Norbert, Osiris, Sarah, and Rebecca. Our new cohort of Transcendence and Transformation post-doctoral fellows cover such diverse fields as African and African Diasporic Religions, Asian Religions, Indigenous Plant Medicine Traditions, Psychedelics and Spirituality, Spirituality and the Arts, and Thinking with Plants and Fungi. And we welcome back our returning researchers and collaborators: Aaron, Adam, Andrew (Jacobs), Andrew (Shenton), Emma, Eve, Fabien, Francesco, Gio, Giovanna, Hai, Jason, Julia, Keith, Matt, Natalia, Nick, Russ, Sam, Shaul, Sherah, Sravana, Stephanie, and Tristan. Together, we are truly a vibrant and prolific community.

Those of you following us for years will be pleased to know that some of our mainstay programming will continue, for example, Giovanna Parmigiani’s “Gnoseologies” series and Matthew Dillon’s Pop Apocalypse podcast. Be on the lookout for their upcoming episodes.

And don’t forget Sherah Bloor’s ongoing poetry events: two readings for the fall semester are already scheduled, and more will soon follow! And please consider exploring the CSWR’s literary and arts journal, Peripheries.

We are excited to announce a conference we’re hosting December 4-5, 2024, “The Teachings and Legacy of G.I. Gurdjieff,” a philosopher, mystic, composer, and dance teacher whose spiritual teaching known as “The Work” has had a long and far-reaching impact on his contemporaries and the new religious movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This conference commemorates the centennial of Gurdjieff’s visit to Harvard in 1924. We are pleased to welcome Carole Cusack from the University of Sydney as a Visiting Scholar to the CSWR for the fall semester. She is a renowned scholar of Gurdjieff and his place in the history of new religious movements, and of Western esotericism more broadly. The CSWR is partnering with the Gurdjieff Society of Massachusetts to host this unique conference, bringing together scholars and practitioners from inside and outside “The Work.” Building up to the December conference, the CSWR will be hosting a reading group led by Carole, as well as a “Movements” dance workshop with guest participation from the Gurdjieff Society of Massachusetts. 

We are pleased to welcome Jeffrey Breau and Paul Gillis-Smith to our team as Program Leads for our Psychedelics and Spirituality programming. Our exploration continues with the longstanding “Psychedelics and the Future of Religion” series and the reading group this year, “Psychedelics and Aesthetics,” led by Paul and current HDS student Tristan Angieri. Our exploration deepens with a new series, “Psychedelics and Ethics,” including a series of workshops led by Visiting Scholar Christine Hauskeller.  Looking ahead, we will be hosting the third annual “Psychedelic Intersections” conference on February 15, 2025. The Call for Papers is now open, with three tracks: Psychedelic Chaplaincy, Indigenous Plant Medicine Traditions, and Psychedelic Aesthetics and the Transcendent. 

We are also pleased to welcome Rachael Petersen to our team as Program Lead for our Thinking with Plants and Fungi initiative, which explores how inquiry into plant and fungal life illuminates the nature of mind and matter and humans’ relationship to the more-than-human world.  You can read Rachael’s interview with Michael Pollan and a piece she wrote on the nineteenth-century plant philosopher Gustav Fechner. The initiative will host a major conference, “An Interdisciplinary Exploration in the Nature of Mind,” May 15-17, 2025, including confirmed speakers Merlin Sheldrake, Giuliana Furci, Emanuele Coccia, Banu Subramanian, Jessica J. Lee, and Michael Marder. The conference Call for Papers is now open. Returning for a third year, the newly-renamed “Thinking with Plants and Fungi” reading group is led by Natalia Schwien, who serves as Advisor and Program Associate for the initiative. You can read Natalia’s reflections on the work of this reading group. 

By the time you are reading this letter, you will have missed the opening reception for our newest art exhibition, “Initiatory Visions,” by Peruvian artist and shaman Randy Chung Gonzales. Years ago, I interviewed Randy and his collaborator Frédérique Apffel-Marglin about their co-authored book, Initiated by the Spirits, and we are very pleased now to show Randy’s simple and beautiful black-and-white pen drawings. The exhibit will hang in our Conference Room for the whole semester, so if you find yourself in the neighborhood, please stop by to see it!

Once again, welcome to our new and returning researchers, and to our new and returning members of staff! We hope you enjoy some of what we have on offer in the coming semester and year. 

See you around the Center!

Charles Stang