About 

Dr. Lydia Bremer-McCollum

Dr. Lydia Bremer-McCollum holds 10+ years of experience reading, translating, and teaching Coptic at Harvard and Princeton Universities.

She is an expert in ancient Christianities, with a special focus on the collection of texts found near Nag Hammadi and Pachomian monastic literature. In 2023-4, she served as a postdoctoral fellow with the digital platform the Coptic Scriptorium. She also runs a weekly open-access online Coptic reading group.

Dr. Jennifer J. Bussio

Jennifer J. Bussio holds a doctorate in East Asian Languages and Civilizations (Chinese) from Arizona State University with a focus on Chinese history and religion. Her research examines how Chinese religions, particularly Daoism, responded to the political and social turmoil caused by war and foreign conquest during the fourth through fourteenth centuries. Since 2018, she has taught history courses at a large, private university in the U.S.

Dr. Adeana McNicholl

Adeana McNicholl is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University. Her scholarship focuses on Buddhism in premodern South Asia and in the United States. Her research engages with the connection between religion and embodiment, particularly race, caste, gender, and sexuality.

Her latest book is Of Ancestors and Ghosts: How Preta Narratives Constructed Buddhist Cosmology and Shaped Buddhist Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Dr. Masoumeh Sara Rahmani

Dr. Masoumeh Sara Rahmani is a senior lecturer in the Study of Religion at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington.

Her research focuses on atheism, nonreligion, and (de)conversion, explored in relation to Buddhist meditation movements and, more recently, within the Māori cultural context. Sara’s recent monograph, Drifting Through Samsara, examined patterns of conversion and deconversion from Goenka’s Vipassana movement in Aotearoa. 

Dr. Thorn Mooney

Thorn Mooney is an author and academic living in Raleigh, North Carolina. She is completing her PhD in religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she specializes in religion and culture. Thorn studies the messy spaces between secularism, magic, and religion, with an eye for where those things overlap and blur. She writes and lectures about new religious movements, American religions, paranormal communities, and contemporary witchcraft for a wide variety of audiences. Her latest book is Witches Among Us: Understanding Contemporary Witchcraft and Wicca.

Dr. Chance E. Bonar

Chance Bonar is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University, whose research and teaching primarily focus on ancient Mediterranean religions, slavery, antisemitism, gender-based violence, and theories of authorship. He has two forthcoming projects: God, Slavery, and Early Christianity: Divine Possession and Ethics in the Shepherd of Hermas (Cambridge University Press) and The Author in Early Christian Literature (Cambridge Elements, Cambridge University Press). Additionally, he has published articles in Ancient Jew Review, the Journal of Late Antiquity, the Journal of Biblical Literature, Early Christianity, and Le Muséon. 

Dr. Rachel Carbonara

Rachel Carbonara is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Culture, Society and Religion at Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. in the Anthropology and Sociology of Religion from the University of Chicago in 2024. Dr. Carbonara's work examines New Age spirituality in the contemporary United States with a focus on practices of manifestation and energy healing. She has conducted ethnographic research with several spiritual groups in the United States as well as with the spiritual tourism industry in Cuzco, Peru. She has also worked for NPR's Invisibilia, Harvard's Ministry of Ideas podcast, and YouTube's Religion for Breakfast. 

Dr. Ari Brouwer

Ari Brouwer is a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has an undergraduate background in Neuroscience and Religious Studies, and master’s degree in the Scientific Study of Religion from Boston University School of Theology. Ari has spent much of the last 15 years thinking about the intersection of psychedelics, psychosis, and spiritual experiences.