How does culture and religion shape human experience, and vice versa? How are experiences shared, held in common, and remembered in communities across time and space?

The Mysticism Lab theorizes the links between tradition, ideas, action, and feeling by way of exploring the intersection of the Arts and the Humanities to trace the long history of a world-changing and reaching cultural tradition that bore fruit at the intersection 
of music, poetry, and religion. The core subject matters of the Lab are Indian, Middle Eastern, and African and are drawn from various early-Modern, Modern, and Premodern periods (but historically are mutually linked). These sources of learning and aesthetic tradition lean into histories of conceiving of society, individuality, beauty, and the emotions in very different ways than has been done in the Western traditions of philosophical and religious reflection.

The Mysticism Lab is led by Mehr Farooqi (Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages & Cultures) and John Nemec (Religious Studies) who are both interested in the aesthetic as a site for conversation, reflection, & experimentation and the line between human ideas and feelings/emotions as a communicative line.