On Monks, Minds, and Motivation: Annual CMEMS Fall Roundtable

What can medieval monks teach us about the mind today—and what can modern psychology and anthropology reveal about medieval mental practices? For our annual CMEMS Fall Roundtable, we're delighted to welcome historian Jamie Kreiner (UCLA) in conversation with our Stanford colleagues Alia Crum (Psychology) and Tanya Luhrmann (Anthropology), to discuss how past and present approaches to cultivating the mind can illuminate one another. 

• Jamie Kreiner is Robert and Dorothy Wellman Chair in Medieval History at the University of California-Los Angeles. A specialist in the intellectual, cultural, and religious life of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, she is particularly interested in understanding how medieval people understood the mind, the body, and the environment. In addition to her recent book The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction (covered in popular press outlets from People to The New Yorker), Professor Kreiner is the author of Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West (Yale, 2020), The Social Life of Hagiography in the Merovingian Kingdom (Cambridge, 2014), and a slew of prize-winning articles.
• Alia J. Crum is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and the Principal Investigator of the Stanford Mind & Body Lab. Her research focuses on how changes in subjective mindsets—the core assumptions we make about things and processes in the world—can alter objective reality through behavioral, psychological, and physiological mechanisms. It further aims to understand how mindsets can be consciously and deliberately changed through intervention to affect physiological and psychological well-being. Professor Crum is a recipient of a NIH New Innovator Award, the Association for Psychological Science’s Rising Star Award, a Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, and the Dean’s Award for First Years of Teaching at Stanford University.
• Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Albert Ray Lang Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department. She is a medical and psychological anthropologist, and also an anthropologist of religion. More recently she describes her work as an anthropology of mind, with her scholarship exploring voices, visions, felt presence and other remarkable events. The author of numerous acclaimed monographs, Professor Luhrmann was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003, received a John Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2007, and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.

A reception will follow in the adjacent Oregon Courtyard.