Authors – WRSP

James A. Santucci

James A. Santucci is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at California State University at Fullerton. His PhD is in Asian Civilizations (Australian National University) with emphasis on Vedic literature. He was editor of Theosophical History from 1990 to 2022 and editor of Theosophical History Occasional Papers from 1993 to 2022. He is the author of numerous articles on Buddhism and Theosophy, including “The Theosophical Society,” “George Henry Felt: The Life Unknown,” “H. P. Blavatsky,” “Brahman and Brahmanism,” and “The Notion of Race in Theosophy.” He is also a contributor of the Sanskrit lexicon for inclusion in the Intercontinental Dictionary Series (http://ids.clld.org).

Vassilis Galanos

Vassilis Galanos is Lecturer in Digital Work based at the Universities of Edinburgh and Stirling. Vassilis investigates the interwoven histories and sociologies of artificial intelligence and the internet, with a particular focus on the negotiation dynamics of expectations and expertise shaping these fields. Vassilis serves as Associate Editor of Technology Analysis and Strategic Management and has published widely on a variety of subjects including science and technology studies, philosophy, media studies, and education. Vassilis’s parallel journey into the world of religious studies began after being nominated Pope of Discordianism by another academic Discordian scholar. Vassilis later became nominated twice Reverend within the Church of the SubGenius and has presented elements of an unpublished scholarly work about the Church at the European Association for the Study of Religion 2019 conference, titled “How to Kill a Joke and a Saviour by Explaining Them Cybernetically: Liquefaction of Humouristic Ritual and Ritualistic Humour in the Assassination of J.R. ‘Bob’ Dobbs.”

Tara B. M. Smith

Tara B. M. Smith is an early-career interdisciplinary academic with a research focus on speculative fiction, new religious movements, popular culture, and ecology. Tara completed her thesis (2022) “The Social Praxis of Science Fiction: Pedagogies of Social Change,” at the University of Sydney Australia. Her thesis explored the power of speculative fiction to promote positive social change in society and incorporated social science methodologies and close readings of texts. She is currently working on a manuscript based on her thesis, “New Religious Movements as Expressed in Science Fiction,” with the Cambridge Elements series. In addition, she is co-principal investigator of the “Mental Sustainability of Long-Term Astronauts: Martian Scientific Odyssey and Astronautical Religion in Space Exploration,” which explores the effect of spirituality and religious belief on the mental health of astronauts. Education is an important element of Tara’s research career: in 2022 she completed her Graduate Certificate in Higher Education and she has taught extensively in a range of units from media studies, new religious movements, utopic fiction, writing studies and economics. Tara currently is a Postdoctoral Fellow of Spirituality and the Arts at the Center of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, currently researching religion in the science fiction universe of Warhammer 40,000.”

Tara Isabella Burton

Tara Isabella Burton is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. Winner of the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for Travel Writing, she completed her doctorate in 19th century French literature and theology at the University of Oxford and is a prodigious travel writer, short story writer and essayist for National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist’s 1843 and more. She is the former Religion Correspondent for Vox, lives in New York, and divides her time between the Upper East Side and Tbilisi, Georgia.

James Tharin Bradford

James Bradford is Associate Professor of History at Berklee College of Music in Boston. He is the author of Poppies, Politics, and Power: Afghanistan and the Global History of Drugs and Diplomacy, which shed light on Afghanistan’s history by exploring the surge of opium production and the failure of global drug prohibition today. He has written articles and chapters, most notably for Iranian Studies, The Oxford Handbook of Global Drug History, The War on Drugs: A History, and Cannabis: Global Histories. He has appeared on NPR, English Al Jazeera, and numerous other podcasts.

Paul Linjamaa

Paul Linjamaa is Associate Professor in the History of Religions and senior assistant lecturer at Lund University. He is specialized in the field of antique religiosity, focusing on ancient Gnosticism, but has also researched and published on various aspects of contemporary esotericism and the reception of Gnosticism in New Religious Movements. His is the author of the monographs The Ethics of The Tripartite Tractate (NHC I, 5) (Leiden: Brill, 2019) and The Nag Hammadi Codices and their Ancient Readers (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Together with Johnny Olsson, he co-wrote one of the first published research articles on MLO. Much of the initial research which the above overview has been based on was made possible through the collaboration with Johnny Olsson.

Nancy Carol James

Nancy Carol James received a PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia for her dissertation titled The Apophatic Mysticism of Madame Guyon. Based on this scholarship, she has published fourteen books on Madame Guyon, the spirituality of Pure Love, and theosis. Her most well-known books are The Complete Madame Guyon (Paraclete Press 2011) and Guyon’s translated Biblical Commentaries and Emblem books (Wipf and Stock). In 2021, James along with Fr. Thomas P. Kuffel published The Ascent to God: Divine Theosis Revealed and Realized in the Teaching of John Paul II. Catholic Bishop Chad Zeilinski, the Bishop of New Ulm, wrote the introduction for the book. Bishop of Honolulu Larry Silva and Cecilia Ann Rezac, Vicar General of the Marian Sisters, endorsed Ascent to God, which received the imprimatur. Dr. Paul Haffner of Pontifical Gregorian University writes in his endorsement of James’ Jeanne Guyon’s Mystical Perfection through Eucharistic Suffering (Wipf and Stock 2020), “Nancy James has become the key and leading expert on Guyon and her invitation to understand the Guyon spirituality better is to be greatly welcomed and appreciated.”

Aurélien Mokoko Gampiot

Dr. Aurélien Mokoko Gampiot is a sociologist, Research Associate on the Archiving the Inner City Project (funded by the Leverhulme Trust) at the Department of Sociology of the university of York (UK). He is also Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Religion and Public Life of the University of Leeds (UK).

A specialist of African religions and African diaspora, he has widely published on Kimbanguism since earning his PhD in Sociology at the University of Rennes 2 (France). His latest book, published by Pennsylvania State University Press in 2017, is available in OpenAccess. More broadly, his research interests are centered on the interplay between religion, race, and gender in African and diasporic communities in Europe and North America. His forthcoming book discusses Black Jews in France.

George Faithful

George Faithful, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Religion & Philosophy at Dominican University of California. His first book, Mothering the Fatherland (Oxford, 2014) analyzed Mother Basilea Schlink and the Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary’s theology of collective German national guilt for the Holocaust. His current book project investigates the intertwined themes of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in the work of Saint John of the Cross. He lives with his wife and kids in Sonoma County.

Eric Harrelson

Eric Harrelson is the Preservation Librarian at Miami University of Ohio. Harrelson has been a film festival programmer and lecturer for Other Worlds Film Festival. He holds a BA from The Ohio State University where he studied English Literature and Film, as well as a Masters in Library and Information Science with a focus in Archival Studies from the University of North Texas. Harrelson has written on film studies and religious studies for Oxford University Press and Religion Dispatches.