Director’s Letter: Reflections on 2024–25 from Professor Charles Stang

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

As another academic year closes, I want to take a moment to reflect on the many accomplishments of our Center’s community. This past year has been marked by expansive scholarship, innovative programming, and meaningful collaborations.

In May, we celebrated the culmination of our 18-month “Thinking with Plants and Fungi” initiative with a phenomenally successful conference that drew large audiences both in person and online. This gathering built upon another historic milestone from December—our conference on “The Teachings and Legacy of G.I. Gurdjieff,” which we proudly co-hosted with the Gurdjieff Society of Massachusetts and the International Association of Gurdjieff Foundations to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Gurdjieff's 1924 visit to the United States. These signature events exemplify our commitment to rigorous scholarship and critical thinking that invite the insights of both scholars and practitioners.

This year has also seen remarkable innovation in how we share scholarship through our new digital displays—online exhibition spaces that allow our scholars of visual and material culture to offer immersive tours of their research through images, texts, and videos. Witness Mariano Villalba’s “Esoteric Mexico: Art, Revolution and the Occult,” exploring Mexican mural art and occult movements; or Keith Cantu’s yogadiagrams.com, a groundbreaking digital archive featuring rare yoga diagrams published between 1880 and 1913 by Sri Sabhapati Swami and his disciples that reveal unexpected connections to Western esoteric movements. These digital exhibits represent an exciting new frontier for public scholarship that will continue to expand next year.

The numbers tell an inspiring story: our 60-member community of faculty, researchers, fellows, residents, students, and staff has produced 74 journal and conference papers, 12 book chapters, eight books, and 44 research reflections this year alone. We have been thrilled to publish these reflections, which translate research conducted at the Center for a broader audience while also welcoming guest contributors from our extended scholarly network. I hope you enjoy the most recent reflections—on Muysca Cosmopolitics, Quimbanda in North America, The Visionary World of Sofía Bassi, New Orders at an Ancient Festival, and Commemoration as Culture: Dukhrana and Shahra Rituals in Assyrian Tradition. We have also launched new initiatives, including our “Texts and Translations of Transcendence and Transformation” book series and our annual publication Theosis, while hosting 31 public events—drawing 7,500 in-person and virtual attendees—and offering 14 reading groups and workshops.

Even as we celebrate these achievements, we are hard at work developing programs and offerings for the coming year. We will be thrilled to announce these exciting new initiatives in the months ahead.

Thank you for being part of our extended community throughout this incredible year. We will be resuming our newsletters and programming in the fall—I look forward to reconnecting then.

Charles M. Stang, Director
Center for the Study of World Religions