In the weeks leading up to our conference at Rice, Jeffrey Kripal hosted a series of live webinar conversations with leading scholars in the field. These conversations pushed the academic study of the paranormal in new directions while they set the tone for the conference to come.

Feb. 8: John Phillip Santos

John Phillip Santos is a Rhodes Scholar, writer, journalist, and documentarian. In addition to television documentaries on religion and culture for CBS News and PBS, myriad magazine articles and newspaper work, he has authored two memoirs, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation (1999 National Book Award Finalist), The Farthest Home is in An Empire of Fire (2010), and a book of poems, Songs Older Than Any Known Singer (2007). He teaches Writing and Mestizo Cultural Studies in the Honors College at University of Texas San Antonio. He is currently working on the last installment in his trilogy of memoirs, and collaborating with Chicano rocker Alejandro Escovedo on a “mythic” memoir of the musician’s storied life in punk rock and beyond.

Feb. 15: Priscilla Wald

Priscilla Wald is R. Florence Brinkley Distinguished Chair of English at Duke University, where she co-edits American Literature with Matthew Taylor. She is the author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Duke, 2008) and Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Duke, 1995). Wald is currently working on a monograph entitled Human Being After Genocide, which considers the “mythistory” of humanity that emerged from efforts to articulate an “underlying spirit of unity” that could sacralize “the human” in the wake of two world wars and a proliferation of scientific and technological developments that challenged conventional notions of life.

Feb. 24: Hussein Ali Agrama

Hussein Ali Agrama is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. His previous research and writing focused on religion and secularism in the Islamic Middle East. A central current of his ongoing research explores how the UFO phenomenon and the anomalies associated with it may profoundly challenge the secular foundations of the contemporary social and humanistic sciences, a recent example of which can be found here.