SIAS Summer Institute 2007-2008 on "The Vision Thing: Studying divine intervention"

Applications will be considered from persons in any field who have made or are making a substantial study of visionaries or visions, broadly defined, with social recognition and social consequences. That is, we are looking for persons studying "effective" visions, whether contemporary or in the past. While the conveners' research has dealt with visions related to European Christianity from late antiquity to the present, we hope the visions studied by the participants come from a broad variety of religious and nonreligious contexts and historical periods, and that the disciplinary approaches are also widely varying, so we can all learn from each other.
In Stanford we will go over studies of visions made from the viewpoints that include anthropology, history, art history, psychology, and neuroscience, with special sessions led by Ann Taves (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Balázs Gulyás (Karolinska Institute, Stockholm).
In Budapest, Fellows will present primary source material they have gathered centering on the vision experiences, their broader context, their conditionants, and their real world consequences. The two sessions are meant to be collaborative workshops in the true sense, providing frames of reference, research tools, and comparative insights for the study of phenomena that at first glance appear to be local, but usually tend to have deep historical roots and can quickly develop international ramifications.

Conveners of this Institute:
Gábor Klaniczay is a Permanent Fellow of Collegium Budapest, Professor of Medieval Studies at the Central European University, Budapest, and at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest.
William A. Christian, Jr. has published extensively on Spanish religion and was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavorial Sciences in 2004 and a MacArthur Fellow in 1986.