The Principal Investigator: Dr. Egil Asprem

Egil on redwood

PI in the woods

Dr. Egil Asprem is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Religious Studies at UCSB, and the PI of the Occult Minds project. Asprem is a specialist of Western esotericism, who conceives of it as an interdisiplinary field strung out between religious studies and intellectual history. While primarily trained as a historian, he also makes frequent use of methods and theories from the social sciences. Asprem received his PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 2013 with an award winning dissertation on disenchantment, esotericism, and the sciences in the early twentieth century. It has recently been published in monograph form as The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse, 1900–1939 (Brill, 2014). Asprem is also the author of Arguing with Angels: Enochian Magic and Modern Occulture (State University of New York Press, 2012), and the co-editor (with Kennet Granholm) of Contemporary Esotericism (Equinox Publishing, 2013). In addition to being responsible for the Occult Minds website, Asprem also blogs at Heterodoxology. You may follow him on Academia.edu.