Tanya Marie Luhrmann is a professor of anthropology at Stanford
University and a contributing opinion writer. Her books include
“Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary
England,” “The Good Parsi: The Fate of a Colonial Elite in a
Postcolonial Society,” “Of Two Minds: The Growing Disorder in
American Psychiatry” and “When God Talks Back: Understanding the
American Evangelical Relationship with God.” She received her
Ph.D. the University of Cambridge, and taught at the University of
California, San Diego, and then at the University of Chicago before
arriving at Stanford. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences in 2003 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. Her
work focuses on the way people experience God and the supernatural in
the United States and abroad. She also studies psychiatric
illness. She is interested in the way that different ways of
understanding the mind alter these profound mental experiences.