Experiences understood as “transcendent” involve perceptions of altered time and space and entail a “dissolution of one’s ordinary sense of self.” Whether accessed through the pathways of psychedelics, rituals, limit experiences of various sorts (sport, adventure, accident), or meditation, these states are both deeply personal and shaped by collective practice. This project seeks to critically examine the interplay between transcendence as an inherent potential of human consciousness and experiences of transcendence as induced by techniques (such as rituals) and interaction with tools and technologies (from wireless telepresence to VR).

Coordinator: Jeffrey Schnapp (metaLAB/Berkman Center for Internet and Society; Romance Languages and Literatures; Comparative Literature)
Co-Coordinator: Sarah Newman (metaLAB/Berkman Center for Internet and Society)

When Elastic magazine was awarded funding from the Psychedelics in Society and Culture initiative and the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics in spring 2024, it was just the seed of an idea; its creators recognized that a narrow, cartoonish version of psychedelic art had taken root in the popular imagination and hoped to make something that would attest to psychedelia’s tremendous breadth. Now, a year later, Elastic is a breathtaking physical object—a 176-page full-color first print issue that was published in March 2025—and a burgeoning community invested in its growth and success. A second issue on the theme of interspecies exchange aspires to be as beautiful, ambitious, and innovatively designed as the first.

Coordinator: Laura van den Berg (Harvard—English)
Co-Coordinators: Hillary Brenhouse (writer, editor), Amanda Gunn (Harvard—English), Darian Longmire (Berkeley—Art Practice)

Frustrated by the limitations of Western medicine, four people seek relief from their physical and mental pain through treatments that induce altered states of consciousness. Their interconnected experiences with psychedelics, music-induced trance, flotation therapy, and hypnosis bring the viewer on a transformative journey of healing from within. This film will help provide cultural context for the therapeutic use of psychedelics, which is at risk of being medicalized for profit by corporate pharmaceutical companies. Our audience includes a range of people who could benefit from, or help advance, healing involving altered states of consciousness.

Coordinator: Julie Mallozzi (Art, Film, and Visual Studies)

The project explores the profound influence of literature, art, and film on psychedelic care. Clinical protocols and scientific research tend to dominate psychedelic training, education, and discourse. Yet many practitioners draw insights, personal grounding, and reflective tools from works outside the psychedelic canon. What touchstones have influenced those who skillfully hold space for others?

Coordinator: Sarah Rossmassler (Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard University)

This study aims to explore how clinical researchers’ personal perspectives and motivations shape their work with psychedelics, focusing on how they reconcile their internal views with the demands of biomedical science. By examining researchers’ perceptions of psychedelics (e.g., as medical interventions, psychotherapeutic adjuncts, catalysts for personal growth, or spiritual sacraments) it will investigate how these beliefs influence clinical trial design, interpretation, and public communication. Using a psychological anthropological lens, it will explore tensions around knowledge production, legitimacy, and authenticity in psychedelic science.

Coordinator: Franklin King (Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School)

An early adopter of LSD, Timothy Leary lost his Harvard job and landed in jail; but he won notoriety as an engaged practitioner of the psychedelic research that he promoted. The proposed combination of events will include a theater performance and research conference inspired by Leary’s legacy.

Coordinator: Doris Sommer (Romance Languages and Literatures; African and African American Studies)

A hybrid animation-documentary that explores the profound existential and psychological dimensions of the dying process will take viewers behind the scenes of a pioneering study—Harvard’s first psychedelic-assisted therapy study in over 60 years—offering psilocybin-assisted therapy to hospice patients experiencing demoralization. At the heart of How to Die is an exploration of how individuals come to terms with the end of life—and what internal and cultural resources they draw upon in this process. How do we reconcile ourselves to terminal illness when we find ourselves unprepared? How might psychedelics serve as a tool for existential exploration and healing at the end of life?

Coordinator: Yvan Beaussant (Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Medical School)

Ibogaine is a prominent psychedelic substance which is in high demand in the Global North for its anti-addictive and psychotherapeutic properties and its commercial potential. However, biopiracy and psychedelic tourism threaten iboga, the natural plant source of ibogaine, and the traditional bwiti spiritual communities in the country of Gabon who are its stewards.This exploratory research project will examine the ethics of reciprocity, commodification, and knowledge governance within the iboga/ibogaine bioculture, focusing on unique access and benefit sharing partnership.

Coordinator: Ashwin Budden (Center for Bioethics, Harvard Medical School)

The recovery of traditional land is an imperative for Indigenous peoples as it is the foundation of their cosmology, cultural memory, sustenance, and sacred traditions. Land-back movements have only been partially successful in certain regions, and the prospects for urban Indigenous communities are not promising. In documenting and helping to cultivate the Muysca urban Indigenous gardens, this project aims to support the acknowledgement of lands for the Muysca of Suba in Bogota, Colombia.

Coordinator: Paola Sanchez-Castaneda (Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School)

This book project is a memoir of a San Francisco childhood spent in the care of a mother whose mental illness took the form of crafting paranoid stories about the city’s psychedelic drug culture—specifically that she was being pursued by an LSD peddling drug syndicate. This was in the ‘70s and ‘80s, when the U.S. was gripped by cultural paranoia about the War on Drugs and San Francisco was still hung over from the Summer of Love. Watching the nightly news—with its dubious tales of grade school drug busts and teachers doling out acid-laced lollipops on the playground—the author’s mother was certain to spot her “enemies” on screen. These sensationalized news reports provided narrative templates and plot points for her own delusional stories and fevered imagination. The book explores paranoia and memoir as forms of world-building, recursive storytelling mechanisms that draw on larger cultural fantasies for their inspiration.

Coordinator: Linda Schlossberg (Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality)

In March 2025, the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish & Israeli Law hosted the first-ever symposium on the religious use of psychedelics in Abrahamic religious communities. This interdisciplinary gathering brought together over one hundred participants, including forty presenters—legal scholars, scholars of religious studies, attorneys, clergy, and psychedelic practitioners—to discuss the religious and cultural roots of these practices, what they look like today, and how they may be accorded legal recognition in the United States. The next stage is to disseminate and build upon the work of the symposium. Its aims are to advance scholarly research on the intersection of Abrahamic traditions and contemporary psychedelic use, and to inform the ongoing public debates on psychedelics, law, and religion.

Coordinators: Noah Feldman and Jay Michaelson (Harvard Law School)

Why do practitioners and advocates of advanced meditation techniques in the contemplative traditions, primarily Hinduism and Buddhism, often express indifference to, or even skepticism of, psychedelic use, even as concepts and descriptions of meditative practices from these traditions have been influential to elucidate the phenomenological qualities and psychometric properties of psychedelic experience? The project will undertake a comprehensive scientific and philosophical literature overview of the practices of advanced meditation and psychedelic use to identify the overlap and differences between these two classes of experience. Given the rapidly evolving field of research in both practices, the project will employ Thomas Metzinger’s dimensional model of the MPE (minimal phenomenological experience) to organize this vast and variegated data on the phenomenology of these experiences.

Coordinator: Swayam Bagaria (Harvard Divinity School)

PULSE convenes legal and religious scholars and practitioners to analyze relationships between law, society, and psychedelic spiritual practices. We approach these topics through the lenses of legal analysis, comparative and historical religious studies, philosophy, psychology, healthcare, and bioethics. Since 2024, PULSE has brought interdisciplinary research and educational programming to Harvard and the public.

Coordinators: Glenn Cohen (Harvard Law School); Mason Marks (Harvard Law School); Susannah Baruch (Harvard Law School); Victoria Littman (Harvard Law School); Paul Gillis-Smith (Harvard Divinity School); Jeffrey Breau (Harvard Divinity School)

This project proposes to research how white supremacy has been used as both a sword and shield in the legal use of psychedelics in the United States. Approaching the issue through a legal lens, incorporating ethnographic and qualitative research, the project will explore this thesis along with potential legal challenges to existing case law that could expand access to psychedelics.

Coordinator: Trevor Findley (Harvard Law School)

As psychedelic-assisted therapies gain recognition in mental health care, the role of spiritual care providers has evolved distinctively in different cultural contexts, yet there has been no systematic examination of how these regional variations might inform more culturally responsive models of care. This study aims to bridge this knowledge gap by analyzing these variances and their implications, ultimately working toward developing comprehensive, culturally-informed models of spiritual care in psychedelic contexts.

Coordinator: Jeffrey Ng (Harvard Divinity School)

This project is part of a longer trajectory of research that seeks to historicize and analyze the relationship between sex workers, altered states, and psychedelics. The ultimate aims of the research are twofold; a consideration of the erotic state as potentially analogous to the psychedelic state as well as an understanding of the practices and experiences of sex workers who administer psychedelics and other consciousness-altering substances to clients.

Coordinator: Emily Lippold-Cheney (Harvard Divinity School)
Co-Coordinator: Hunter Leight

John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office is an essay film about the mysteries of consciousness and communication channeled through neurophysiologist and “psychonaut” John C. Lilly, a daring experimenter with dolphins and psychedelics. Lilly’s motto — “My body is my laboratory” — carried him into realms of radical self-investigation, while his research also helped bring dolphins and whales into public consciousness in the 20th century.

Coordinator: Max Bowens (Art, Film, and Visual Studies)
Co-Coordinators: Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens

This project will conduct field research on the contemporary usage of psychedelics in Tibetan Buddhist devotional rituals, practices, medicine, and psychology. More specifically, the project will study how  the usage of psychedelics allows practitioners, during meditative retreats, to engage in communication with animal, plant, elemental, and other forms of “more-than-human” life.

Coordinator: Peter Dziedzic (Committee on the Study of Religion)

The Global North is gripped by an escalating crisis of disconnection—rising suicide and addiction rates, an epidemic of loneliness, and a mental health paradigm that often prioritizes pharmacological intervention over true healing. At the same time, contemporary narratives and research around psychedelics have largely been dominated by Western clinical frameworks, sidelining the voices of those who have safeguarded these practices for generations. This project seeks to create a podcast that corrects that imbalance by foregrounding Indigenous knowledge not as merely an adjunct to Western medicine, but as an epistemology of healing in its own right.

Coordinator: Aaron J. Finder (Harvard Business School)
Co-Coordinators: CJ LoConte (Harvard Kennedy School); Adham Bedir (Harvard Business School); Jason Chukwuma (Harvard Law School)
Team: Hannah Schon; Tommy Armour IV; Mike Flores; Ali Amirhooshmand; Brad Stoddard

The emergence of virtual reality technology enables innovative approaches to mental health research, which intersect with the artistic disciplines of music, visual art, and immersive entertainment. While investigation of the therapeutic potential of VR is still in its early stages, there is evidence that VR experiences can confer measurable benefits by cultivating mindfulness and stimulating the imagination to produce therapeutic outcomes. Virtual Psychedelia proposes to utilize the unique affordances of VR to create an immersive simulation of a therapeutic psychedelic experience.

Coordinator: Micah Huang (Music)

This anthropological study will investigate the subjective experience of psilocybin sessions in the clinical trial taking place at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, “Feasibility Phase 2 Study of Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy for Opioid-Refractory Pain in Patients with Advanced Cancer.” Engaging with questions regarding how individuals make sense of and derive meaning from the experience, as well as the experiential relationship between body and mind, this study is at intersection of biomedical research and humanistic inquiry.

Coordinators: Yvan Beaussant (Dana-Farber Cancer Institute), Sara Fragione, Isabel Kristan, and Kabir Nigam

Learn more at: https://psychedelics.dana-farber.org/

The event will include three presentations, followed by a panel discussion in which the presenters ask one another questions. This will be followed by a Q&A with the audience. The panel will address the following questions from three distinct disciplinary vantage points: how can the psychedelic state inform understandings of messianic impulses and revolutionary political thought, and vice versa? Additionally, what are the possibilities, limits, and challenges of using psychedelics to foster sociopolitical change and/or reconciliation? By staging a dialogue on these questions between a cultural historian, a social psychologist, and a human ecologist, we aim to model and to stimulate rigorous examination of what “psychedelic consciousness” means, and the relationship between such consciousness and political imagination.

Coordinator: Nicholas Bloom (History & Literature)

In partnership with the Mass General Center for the Neuroscience of Psychedelics’ Schultes Legacy Project, we propose to host a digital art exhibition that showcases the interdisciplinary study of psychoactive plants and explores educational opportunities connecting art and science across spatial scales, time, and cultures. Entitled “Microcosms: A Homage to the Sacred Plants of the Americas,” this exhibit will feature the collaborative work of Jill Pflugheber and Steven F. White, who have used laser-scanning confocal microscopy to vividly reveal the intricate 3D cellular architecture and provide a commentary on the sacred and medicinal plants used by Indigenous Peoples of America, thereby catalyzing discussion regarding the continued importance of preserving traditional knowledge and biodiversity.

Coordinator: Stephen Haggarty (Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School)

https://www.massgeneral.org/psychiatry/treatments-and-services/center-for-the-neuroscience-of-psychedelics; https://www.microcosmssacredplants.org

The aim of this research is to better understand the role that humanistic studies of non-ordinary states of consciousness have played in the historical emergence of the field generally known as consciousness studies. It is part of a larger book project that will be the first history of modern consciousness research. This project seeks to recover the relevant, entangled histories, understand their complex relationship to the better-known neuroscience work on consciousness, and begin to make sense of the ongoing legacies of these fragmented and even polarizing alternative understandings of consciousness research for the cultural work of our own moment.

Researcher: Anne Harrington (History of Science)

In this interdisciplinary project we explore psychedelic humanities and especially how values influence perceptions of psychedelics. We discuss psychedelic hype, decolonial ethics, critical psychedelic imaginaries, psychiatric discourse, and the epistemic biases in research methodologies and regulatory frameworks. We hold a two-day hybrid conference in November 2024, on how the humanities and social sciences can enrich medical psychedelic studies and vice-versa, featuring expert presentations and discussion about new pathways for bridging existing divides. To complement intellectual discourses and experientially engaging with care through embodied practice, we also organize and facilitate a Dreamshadow Transpersonal Breathwork (DTB) workshop for researchers and practitioners at Harvard and beyond.

Coordinators: Franklin King, MD (Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School), Christine Hauskeller, PhD (University of Exeter), Eduardo Schenberg, PhD (Instituto Phaneros), and Claudia Gertraud Schwarz, PhD

Social Media (Twitter/X): @kingfrankliniv, @psychedelicSTS, and @ee_schenberg

In this project, voice interviews with people over 65 who use psychedelics will be recorded. Prof. Lingford expects to explore how these drugs can affect our attitude to aging and death, but I will be open to unexpected subjects that may surface. Having collated the interviews, and made a rough edit of the voices, she will make an animated film that at times illustrates the dialogue but also takes on a life of its own. The visuals will aim to bring us nearer to a communication of the psychedelic experience itself but also to the altered states of mind that persist in the longer term. The project’s main aim is to look at this social phenomenon, and also to help people decide whether this is an experience that might be productive for them.

Coordinator: Ruth Lingford (Art, Film, and Visual Studies)

Can the unconscious mind heal mental and physical pain? This meditative documentary travels into the minds of five people seeking altered states of consciousness to treat medical conditions and mental illnesses that confound modern medicine.

Coordinator: Julie Mallozzi (Art, Film, and Visual Studies)

Psychedelic Use, Law, and Spiritual Experience (PULSE) will analyze the complex and evolving relationship between law, psychedelic spiritual practices, and society. The project will develop novel interdisciplinary scholarship and educational programming. 

Coordinators: Mason Marks, Glenn Cohen, and Susannah Baruch (all at Harvard Law School)

This project will center around field research on the contemporary usage of psychedelics in Sufi devotional rituals and practices. More specifically and in the context of my dissertation research, I propose to study how the usage of psychedelics allows practitioners, during meditative retreats, to engage in communication with animal, plant, elemental, and other forms of life.

Coordinator: Peter Dziedzic (Religion)

In the popular imagination, “psychedelia” refers to little more than Day-Glo mandalas and jam-band music—a narrow and cartoonish version of what psychedelic art is and might be. Elastic, a biannual print magazine, will publish a diverse and expansive body of psychedelic art and literature while also paying tribute to an overlooked archive of psychedelic work, much of which was made by radically innovative artists, writers, and thinkers of color.

Coordinators: Amanda Gunn (Harvard—English), Hillary Brenhouse (writer, editor), Darian Longmire (Berkeley—Art Practice), Laura van den Berg (Harvard—English), Elena Conis (Berkeley—Journalism)

Learn more: https://twitter.com/elasticmag

Immersive, Intermedia performance featuring electronic music and video-projected “Virtual Psychedelia” generated from real EEG brainwave data recorded during a psychedelic therapy session. The performance explores the potential of aesthetically mediated neural entrainment as a means of expanding access to the therapeutic benefits of psychedelic therapy.

Coordinators: Micah Huang (Music), Dr. Ying Choon Wu (Computational Neuroscience at UCSD), and Enrique Carillosulub (Computational Neuroscience at UCSD)

Learn more: https://www.micahhuangmusic.com and @hungryghostnote on Instagram and TikTok

One of the defining features of the contemporary “Psychedelic Renaissance” is the institutionalization of psychedelic research within universities. To offer a historical perspective on this process, the project examines the history of the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in hopes to shed light on the controversies surrounding its legitimacy, the opposition towards accreditation of CIIS and its programs, and the Institute’s central role in the longue durée of psychedelic research. The project will engage with some of the seminal interests in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS): scientific controversies, the institutionalization of alternative scientific and intellectual movements, jurisdictional struggles over expertise, and cultural perception of science and scientific legitimacy.

Coordinator: Matt Przemyslaw Lukacz (History of Science)

Psychedelic Pathways is a collaborative project initiated by the Harvard Psychedelics Club to bridge the gap between student interest and career opportunities in the psychedelic field. This initiative aims to enhance understanding of the sector, provide practical career guidance, and create a mentorship network by partnering with academics, professionals, and other universities.

Coordinator: Yana Lazarova-Weng (Neuroscience/Psychology & Harvard Psychedelics Club)

Mass Moving is a transdisciplinary collective of creators based in Belgium (1968-1975) concerned with reclaiming society through creative action and social change. Through studying one of their catalyst events, Society in Conflict, I will piece together their work and the relationship between society, creativity, and psychedelics in Belgian avant-garde and global counterculture at-large.

Coordinator: Halianna Leland (Social Studies)

How do cultures expand or reform themselves when learning from the experiences and expertise of separate cultures and traditions? As we skirt the bound of appropriation and influence, what methods and patterns lead to mutual benefit as well as the distinct identity of the emerging practice and how can pioneers of cultural expansion orient themselves in order to honorably and effectively lay a foundation for the future, particularly when submerging themselves in the numinous, spiritual, and mythological landscapes that give our societies meaning.

Coordinator: Sabastian Mandell (Integrative Biology/Psychology)

Learn more: https://substack.com/@emergingpresent?utm_source=profile-page and https://www.linkedin.com/in/sabastianmandellbiopsy/

Thanks to funding from the Mahindra Center, I will be able to spend my summer writing and researching for my Senior thesis, written for my joint concentration in History & Literature and History of Science. I intend to examine the relationship between sacred psychedelic substances and three strands of American culture from the late 1950s through the 1970s: first, and most fundamentally, the CIA and their MK-Ultra program; second, and relatedly, psychiatric and ethnobotanical research undertaken by universities during the period; and third, American counter culturalists, who flocked to Huautla de Jiménez in order to fulfill their personal psychedelic desires.

Coordinator: Samantha Weil (History & Literature)