Literary Theory on Acid: A Psychedelic Humanities Toolkit

This year's SANAS Spring Reading Group will take place at the University of Lausanne in hybrid form on Friday, April 17th. We are very excited to welcome Ramzi Fawaz as our speaker.

Ramzi Fawaz is a Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and host of the podcast Nerd from the Future. He is the author of two books, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (2016) and Queer Forms (2022), both published by NYU Press. Since Fall 2024, Fawaz has been a contributing editor to the journal Film Quarterly, where he authors 'Imagination Unbound,' a column about the radical democratic spirit of contemporary popular culture. He is currently writing a book titled How to Think Like a Multiverse: Psychedelic Pathways to Embracing a Diverse World. In it, he argues for an understanding of humanities education as a form of psychedelic therapy, which uses art, literature, and media, instead of psychoactive drugs, to induce positive transformational effects on the wellbeing of multiple generations of students. Last April he edited a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on 'Psychedelic Imaginaries.'