Devin Zuber
Stockholm University, Department of Culture and Aesthetics (Literature), Visiting Research Professor
I'm an associate professor of American Studies, Religion, and Literature at the Graduate Theological Union (GTU) in Berkeley, California, and the George F. Dole Professor of Swedenborgian Studies. Currently on sabbatical for 2021-2022, I am also presently a Visiting Professor of Religion and Literature at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
At the GTU, I primarily teach in our PhD program's concentrations for Art & Religion, New Religious Movements, and Religion & Literature. My professorship is housed at the GTU's Center for Swedenborgian Studies (CSS), and much of my teaching and research is focused on the nineteenth-century cultural reception of the Scandinavian scientist-turned-mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688--1772). I am former chair of the GTU's Department for Historical and Cultural Studies of Religion.
Prior to coming to Berkeley in 2011, I taught at the University of Osnabrueck and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, both in Germany, and at Queens College in New York City. I've been a fellow, scholar-in-residence, or visiting research professor at the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library (London), at the Wabash Center for Religion and Theology at Wabash College in Indiana, in Stockholm University’s Department for Aesthetics and Culture (Sweden), at the Mesa Writer's Refuge in Point Reyes, California (with the Gardarev Center), and at the Rachel Carson Center for the Environment at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In 2016, I was also a scholar-in-residence at the former estate of the film director Ingmar Bergman on Fårö island (Sweden).
My last book, *A Language of Things: Swedenborg and the American Environmental Imagination* (UVA Press, 2019) explores the impact of Swedenborgian thought on nineteenth century ecological aesthetics. Other publications include nineteenth century American literature (Emerson, Hawthorne, Audubon, Henry James), the memorial aesthetics of 9/11, ecocriticism, and Don DeLillo.
While on sabbatical, I am completing several collected volumes of essays--including a book about spirituality and the work of the contemporary performance artist, Marina Abramovic--as well as launching a new book project about art and esoteric spiritualities within the Berkeley and San Francisco Renaissances of the 1950's and 60's.
At the GTU, I primarily teach in our PhD program's concentrations for Art & Religion, New Religious Movements, and Religion & Literature. My professorship is housed at the GTU's Center for Swedenborgian Studies (CSS), and much of my teaching and research is focused on the nineteenth-century cultural reception of the Scandinavian scientist-turned-mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688--1772). I am former chair of the GTU's Department for Historical and Cultural Studies of Religion.
Prior to coming to Berkeley in 2011, I taught at the University of Osnabrueck and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, both in Germany, and at Queens College in New York City. I've been a fellow, scholar-in-residence, or visiting research professor at the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library (London), at the Wabash Center for Religion and Theology at Wabash College in Indiana, in Stockholm University’s Department for Aesthetics and Culture (Sweden), at the Mesa Writer's Refuge in Point Reyes, California (with the Gardarev Center), and at the Rachel Carson Center for the Environment at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In 2016, I was also a scholar-in-residence at the former estate of the film director Ingmar Bergman on Fårö island (Sweden).
My last book, *A Language of Things: Swedenborg and the American Environmental Imagination* (UVA Press, 2019) explores the impact of Swedenborgian thought on nineteenth century ecological aesthetics. Other publications include nineteenth century American literature (Emerson, Hawthorne, Audubon, Henry James), the memorial aesthetics of 9/11, ecocriticism, and Don DeLillo.
While on sabbatical, I am completing several collected volumes of essays--including a book about spirituality and the work of the contemporary performance artist, Marina Abramovic--as well as launching a new book project about art and esoteric spiritualities within the Berkeley and San Francisco Renaissances of the 1950's and 60's.
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Books by Devin Zuber
In A Language of Things, Devin Zuber offers a critical attempt to restore the fundamental role that religious experience could play in shaping nineteenth-century American approaches to natural space. By tracing the ways that Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Vachel Lindsay all variously responded to Swedenborgian thought, Zuber illuminates the complex dynamic that came to unfold between the religious, the literary, and the ecological.
https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5062
Publications by Devin Zuber
In A Language of Things, Devin Zuber offers a critical attempt to restore the fundamental role that religious experience could play in shaping nineteenth-century American approaches to natural space. By tracing the ways that Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Vachel Lindsay all variously responded to Swedenborgian thought, Zuber illuminates the complex dynamic that came to unfold between the religious, the literary, and the ecological.
https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5062
• What can the case of Swedenborg in the arts tell us about broader constitutive relationships between esotericism, spirituality, and culture?
• How do Swedenborg’s ideas configure within larger projects of nineteenth and twentieth century (re)enchantment, and trouble the academy’s assumptions about modernity and the secular?
• What might the recent attention to religion, sensation, and materiality within literary studies and art history have to say about Swedenborg’s concepts of spiritual-and-material correspondence—ideas that turned the world “into a living poem,” in Emerson’s phrasing?
• Where have Swedenborg’s ideas fruitfully encountered other forms of esotericism with strong artistic analogues, such as Theosophy or Mazdaznan?
KEYNOTES: Wouter Hanegraaff (Amsterdam), Linda Dalrymple Henderson (UT Austin), Massimo Introvigne (CESNUR / Turin). Confirmed speakers: Adrienne Baxter Bell (Marymount), Cordula Grewe (U-Penn), Anders Hallengren (Stockholm), Marco Pasi (Amsterdam), William Rowlandson (Kent), and Robert Rix (Aalborg).
https://tinyurl.com/swedarts