Erin Yerby

Academic Program Affiliation(s): Language and Thinking Program

Biography: Erin Yerby (B.A., Colorado College; M.T.S.,Duke University; M.A., U. of Minnesota) is currently completing her dissertation in Anthropology at Columbia University. Her doctoral work focuses on bodily spectrality and religious experience within the spiritual history of North American settlement. Her dissertation, Spectral Bodies of Evidence: Mediumship and the Remaking of Modern Sense, draws upon ethnographic fieldwork among contemporary Spiritualist mediums in upstate New York. Alongside her academic work, she has written on contemporary American female painters in New York, appearing in the Brooklyn Rail and elsewhere. Teaching and research interests include religious experience and secularity in settler societies, anthropology of religion, the bodily sensorium and aesthetics, performance, psychoanalysis and hysteria, and more generally, the relation between abstraction and affect. An essay, “Spectral Bodies of Evidence,” conceptualizing the emergence of the spectral body and the problem of invisible evidences in the Salem Witch Trials is forthcoming in the edited volume, Speculation, Heresy and Gnosis in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion: The Enigmatic Absolute. Erin has presented work in various academic conferences, including the American Association of Religion, American Association of Geographers, American Comparative Literature Association, and the American Anthropological Association.
Phone: 845-758-7141
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