Heterodoxology

Among the updates: 1st International Conference on Contemporary Esotericism

A number of newsworthy things have popped up in the world of esotericism scholarship lately, but as I have been tied up with reaching deadlines, they have not found their way to Heterodoxology yet. The solution? A brief list of updates, below. Some of it you may already have read about over at Invocatio, the Phoenix Rising website, or some other etheric place, but no harm is done in hearing something twice.

• First off, Wouter Hanegraaff’s long anticipated book has finally been released by Cambridge University Press. Make sure to check out  Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture soon – it will undoubtedly shape the field for years to come.

• Continuing on that note, a release party with a public debate on the book’s thesis will be held in Amsterdam on February 8. The debaters are Rens Bod (Professor of Computational and Digital Humanities, University of Amsterdam),  Albert F. De Jong (Professor, Religions of Antiquity, University of Leiden), and Cees Leijenhorst history of Modern Philosophy, Radboud University Nijmegen). The moderator is Demetrius Waarsenburg (Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences), and Gerard Wiegers (Professor of Religious Studies, UvA) will chair. The first copy of the book will be presented by the author. The evening is hosted by Spui25, and will be in Dutch.

• The relation between academia and esotericism was the topic of one of last year’s sessions at the AAR in San Francisco as well. The Phoenix Rising Academy’s session on Demons in the Academy was filmed, and has now been made available online. An admirable initiative!

• There is also news about the large forthcoming volume on Contemporary Esotericism, that I have been editing together with Kennet Granholm. After minor revisions, a new and complete description is out on the publisher’s website. Publication date has been moved closer, and is now scheduled for October 2012.

• As advertised before, there will be a conference on the theme of Contemporary Esotericism as well this August, in Stockholm, Sweden. New and revised information on this has just been published online. Remember the deadline for submitting paper proposals: March 30!

• Finally, some news from the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE). By the end of last year, the ESSWE had accepted two new thematic networks to work under its auspices, namely: The ESSWE Network for the Study of Esotericism in Antiquity (coordinated by Dylan Burns); and Contemporary Esotericism Research Network (ContERN; coordinated by Kennet Granholm and Egil Asprem). These were both announced in the previous Newsletter of the ESSWE. More information will appear soon. In addition to these, the ESSWE has also acknowledged as an affiliate the Center for the Study of Western Esotericism of the Union of South American Nations (CEEO-UNASUR), organised by Juan Pablo Bubello in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We look forward to hear more about this development in the future.

(This round-up has been inspired by Invocatio’s weekly “Mysteria Misc. Maxima” series. I am hoping it will not have to become a frequent phenomenon, and promise to have a regular blog post up again before too long.)

This work by Egil Asprem was first published on Heterodoxology. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.