Erik Davis, PhD

Underground icon, independent scholar, author, award-winning journalist, sometimes podcaster, and popular speaker.

Erik Davis (www.techgnosis.com) is an author, scholar, and teacher based in San Francisco. His wide-ranging work focuses on the intersection of alternative religion, media, and the popular imagination. He is the author, most recently, of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (MIT Press/Strange Attractor Press), and also wrote the cult classic Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information. Davis has spoken widely at universities, conferences, retreat centers, and festivals, and has been interviewed by CNN, the BBC, NPR, and theNew York Times. He graduated from Yale University in 1988, and earned his PhD in religious studies at Rice University in 2015. He currently writes the newsletter Burning Shore (www.burningshore.com) and his extensive online archive can be accessed at www.techgnosis.com.

Keynote presentation – The Flickering Phantasm