Egil Asprem

Egil Asprem is a historian of religions and a specialist in the study of esotericism. Earning his PhD from the University of Amsterdam’s Center for History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents (2013), much of Asprem’s research has centred on the history of magic, and its entanglements with science, politics, and emerging forms of religiosity in the modern world. He is the author of Arguing with Angels: Enochian Magic and Modern Occulture (SUNY, 2012) and The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse, 1900–1939 (Brill, 2014). Following a two-year postdoc at UCSB (2013-2015) he entered interdisciplinary collaborations in the cognitive and evolutionary science of religion, with a focus on the problem of religious experience.

Building on these core interests, Asprem has published on a range of other related topics, including conspiracy theories, worldview studies, transhumanism, esotericism and the far right, and more recently Romani studies. He is editor-in-chief of Aries, the flagship journal for the study of esotericism, and co-editor of volumes including Contemporary Esotericism (2013), the Brill Handbook of Conspiracy Theory and Contemporary Religion (2019), Religious Dimensions of Conspiracy Theories (2023), and New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism (2021).

As a Sabbatical Fellow at SCAS, Asprem will work on a monograph exploring how European conceptions and traditions of magic shaped the fate of the continent’s Romani minorities from the beginning of the diaspora in the late-Middle Ages to the establishment of the Gypsy Lore Society at the end of the nineteenth century.

Egil Asprem is in residence in the spring of 2026.
This information is accurate as of the academic year 2025-26.