Interviews

Harold D. Roth is Professor of Religious Studies and the Director of the Contemplative Studies Initiative at Brown University. He designed the first university concentration program in Contemplative Studies and is the author of The Contemplative Foundations of Classical Daoism (2021). He is also on the executive committee of the International Society for Contemplative Research (ISCR).

Kevin Hart is the Jo Rae Wright University Professor in the Divinity School at Duke University. He is the author of Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation (2023) and Wild Track: New and Selected Poems (2015).

John Dunne holds the Distinguished Chair of Contemplative Humanities in the Center for Healthy Minds and the department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the co-author of The Mind (2020) and co-editor of Ecology, Ethics, and Interdependence: The Dalai Lama in Conversation with Leading Thinkers on Climate Change (2018).

Stephanie Paulsell is the Susan Shallcross Swartz Professor of the Practice of Christian Studies at Harvard Divinity School. She is the author of Religion Around Virginia Woolf (2019) and co-editor of Goodness and the Literary Imagination (2019).

Eleanor Johnson is associate professor of English and comparative literature and director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University. She is the author of Waste and the Wasters: Poetry and Ecosystemic Thought in Medieval England (2023).

Jordan Quaglia is Associate Professor of Psychology, Director of the Cognitive and Affective Science Laboratory, and Research Director of the Center for the Advancement of Contemplative Education at Naropa University.

Michael Chase is Senior Researcher at the Centre Jean Pépin of the National Center of Scientific Research in Paris-Villejuif, France and adjunct professor of Greek and Roman studies at the University of Victoria. He is the author and translator of Ammonius: Interpretation of Porphyry’s Introduction to Aristotle’s Five Terms (2020).

Iya Funlayo E. Wood is a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, Founding Director of the African and Diasporic Religious Studies Association, and Guest Editor for Special Issue #05: Contemplation in Africana Traditions in the Journal of Contemplative Studies.

Ariel Evan Mayse is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University, the senior scholar-in-residence at the Institute of Jewish Spirituality and Society, and an ordained rabbi. He is the author of Laws of the Spirit: Ritual, Mysticism, and the Commandments in Early Hasidism (2024), Speaking Infinities: God and Language in the Teachings of Rabbi Dov Ber of Mezritsh (2020), and Guest Editor for the JCS Special Issue #03: Contemplative Ecology.

Julia Cassaniti is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia and author of Living Buddhism: Mind, Self, and Emotion in a Thai Community (2015).