Advisor: Professor April DeConick

Camden Roy is a PhD student in the Department of Religion. His research focuses on esoteric and occult approaches to Christianity related to the early Theosophical Society, especially within the works of Anna Kingsford, H.P. Blavatsky, G.R.S. Mead, and Annie Besant. He is interested in how European occult thinkers within the shifting social and colonial contexts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries innovate upon Christianity and Christian history, exposing familiar texts as sites of radical possibility for social meaning-making. Grounded in training in both early Christianity and the history of esotericism, Roy’s dissertation charts a history of the esoteric Christian imaginary from the beginnings of the Theosophical Society to the start of the First World War.