CURRENT MISSION

creating communities making art changing the world

ABOUT ME

I am an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Puget Sound, where I teach classes on psychedelics and literature. I am also working on my book project, “Chemical Poetics: The Literary History of Psychedelic Science.” I am a 2015-16 Research Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Timothy Leary Papers and a Research Fellow with the New York University Psilocybin Cancer Anxiety Study, where I participated in a qualitative study of patient experiences. I received my PhD in 2015 from the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania, where I studied psychedelic philosophy, the literary history of chemical self-experimentation (“trip reports”), and radical poetics. I taught the class “Drug Wars: The Influence of Psychoactive Rhetoric” as a 2014-15 Critical Speaking Fellow, and I was also a 2014-15 Andrew W. Mellon Graduate Research Fellow with the Penn Humanities Forum, where I worked on the project “‘Innumerable Fine Shades’: Psychedelics and Synesthesia in the Literary Self-Experiments of Aldous Huxley.” I am a founder of the Psychedemia interdisciplinary psychedelics conference, and the former editor of “This Week in Psychedelics,” a Reality Sandwich column that reported on psychedelic news in the media between 2011 and 2013. I was a founding member of the MAPS Graduate Student Association, which I moderated during 2011-13, and I have presented on psychedelics at numerous conferences in the United States, Canada, England, and Australia.

My interests include visionary art, psychedelic culture, hyperspace philosophy, consciousness studies, romanticism, poetics and ideology, (r)evolution, deconstruction and psychoanalysis, continental philosophy/critical theory, paradigm shifts, history of science, futures studies, media studies, and performance. I have a tattoo of the Mandelbrot Set on my foot, because fractals are everywhere, and in everything I do.

PHILOSOPHY

I study culture and system formation, the ways that we create reality, with the hope of helping to reshape reality by describing it and by teaching it. I want to help create new concepts and constructs that can describe the world we live in, because if we know how we construct reality, we can consciously construct a reality that is more to our choosing.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

I CouchSurf during my travels to academic conferences around the world, and I host at my home in Philadelphia.

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

CouchSurfed in LA (3x), Davis (1x), and Sacramento (1x).

Hosted in Philadelphia (1x).

CS meetup in LA (1x).

Interests

creating reality, psychedelic culture, hyperspace philosophy, Terence McKenna, visionary art, continental philosophy, Rainbow family, Burning Man, performatism, Antonio Gramsci, Chris Marker, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Walter Benjamin, Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Lacan, Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Derrida, Grant Morrison, apocalyptic visionaries, revolution, aesthetics, democratic socialism, eco-socialism, Samuel Palmer, Friedrich Neitzche, Rainer Maria Rilke, Marcel Proust, Remedios Varo, comparative literature, critical theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, deconstruction, art, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philip Pullman, Genesis, William Morris, Aubrey Beardsley, the Pre-Raphaelites, damask, paisley, metaphors, progress, the sublime, mythopoeic poetry, contrapuntal symbolism, bricolage, the Mandelbrot set, Immanuel Kant, Julia Kristeva, unknown knowns, the cosmic joke

• arts
• culture
• humanities
• books
• literature
• poetry
• performing arts
• news
• cartography
• communications
• history
• science

Music, Movies, and Books

Books: The Joyous Cosmology, The Doors of Perception, High Priest, Understanding Media, Of Grammatology, Interrogating the Real, The Fragile Absolute, Écrits, Philosophical Investigations, On Certainty, Phenomenology of Spirit, Autobiography of a Yogi, Making Truth: Metaphor in Science, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, Fearful Symmetry, An Art of Limina, Illuminations, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, As I Lay Dying, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Candide, His Dark Materials, 1984, The Illustrated Man, The Great Gatsby, The Abhorsen Trilogy, Invisible Cities, Paradise Lost, Language in Thought and Action, Looking Awry, The Return of the Real, Remnants of Auschwitz, Critique of Pure Reason, Kristeva and the Political, The Romantic Ideology

Music: The Velvet Underground, Feathers, Radiohead, Josephine Foster, Broken Social Scene, Yann Tiersen, Mississippi John Hurt, The Incredible String Band, Regina Spektor, Devendra Banhart, Vetiver, Joanna Newsom, Marissa Nadler, Os Mutantes, Six Organs of Admittance, Leo Kottke, John Fahey, Bob Dylan, Akron/Family, Panda Bear, Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, Beirut, The Books, Wilco, Ramona Cordova, Sufjan Stevens, Ruscoe Holcomb, Interpol, TV on the Radio, Jose Gonzalez, Lau Nau

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Three consecutive years (2010, 2011, 2012) at the annual Rainbow Gathering have consistently blown my mind. Participating in building a fairy city for tens of thousands of people in the depths of the forest is an experience that I will not soon forget. The synchronicities abound.

Teach, Learn, Share

I've recently been making headbands out of friendship bracelets and yarn. I'd love to show you how!

Countries I’ve Visited

Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Turkey, United Kingdom

Countries I’ve Lived In

United States

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