Psychedelics in Society
and Culture Fellowship Program

Bridging Psychedelic Rituals with VR Set and Setting through Fractal Geometry: Explores how virtual reality might support culturally informed psychedelic therapy by examining the principles of ritual design, specifically drawing from Santo Daime traditions. By integrating qualitative research, computational modeling, and abstract fractal geometry, the project aims to build a prototype of a VR experience that evokes ritual structure without appropriating specific cultural symbols, with guidance from engaged practitioners.

Luc Virgili Phan is an undergraduate student in the College of Letters & Science at UC Berkeley. With a background spanning mathematics, cognitive science, and digital media, Virgili Phan’s work explores the intersections of technology, perception, and ritual. His academic interests include computational aesthetics, consciousness studies, and the cultural dimensions of immersive design. Virgili Phan has previous research experience in data science and neurodegeneration and is particularly drawn to the creative and ethical potential of emerging technologies in shaping human experience.

Elastic: Elastic is a print magazine and cultural initiative committed to a truly expansive, inclusive vision of psychedelic art. Through its second issue, publishing in spring 2026, and a series of live events, the project will bring together a vast body of contemporary psychedelic work while paying tribute to an often overlooked creative archive. An expanded public program will deepen cross-disciplinary dialogue, spotlight performance and other art forms that can’t live on the page, and offer a platform for artists, scholars, and others to explore the shape—and future—of modern psychedelic culture. 

Hillary Brenhouse is a Montreal-based writer and the editor and publisher of Elastic, a magazine of psychedelic art and literature. Formerly editor-in-chief of Guernica and editorial director at Bold Type Books, she also curated the Guardian’s Antiracism and America series. Her writing—focused on reproductive health, capitalism, and cultural memory—has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Time. She holds degrees from McGill and NYU, and toggles between critiquing the cartoonish popular vision of psychedelia and the poor information available on cannabis use in pregnancy.

Multigenerational Perspectives of Psilocybin Mushrooms in Urban Native Communities
This project explores how Native people across generations understand and relate to psilocybin mushrooms in contemporary urban contexts. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Native participants ages 18 to 80 in the South and Northwest United States, the study examines how perspectives on psilocybin have shifted over time, across eras shaped by counterculture movements, criminalization, stigma, cultural loss, and renewed interest in healing.

The research looks at how spirituality, recreation, trauma, cultural reconnection, and community norms shape attitudes and experiences. The project aims to contribute to more culturally informed public health conversations about psychedelics and to further the understanding of how historical context and generational experience influence healing practices today.

Marlena Robbins is the Program Coordinator for the Indigenous Student Research Fellowship. She is a DrPH candidate at UC Berkeley specializing in Indigenous knowledge, psychedelic science, and mental health policy. She has contributed to SAMHSA, the Colorado Natural Medicine Tribal Working Group, and BCSP Certificate Training Program. Marlena’s work blends policy analysis, multigenerational Native perspectives, and human-centered design to support ethical, community-led approaches to psychedelic-assisted therapy in Native-serving health systems.

On the Floor: A performance-based research project exploring the role of psychedelics in queer nightlife during the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Through a public artist talk and a series of oral history interviews, the project will trace how psychedelic substances and practices shaped experiences of grief, pleasure, and community on the dance floor.

Maria Silk is a Ph.D. student in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. Silk’s practice as a choreographer and artist emerges from a decade of experience within Bay Area queer nightlife as a drag performer, DJ, and producer. Her performance and video work exploring the relationship between queer history, desire, and power has been presented at local venues including BAMPFA, CounterPulse, Slash, and Southern Exposure as well as internationally at Fierce Festival (Birmingham, UK) and Improspekcije (Zagreb, Croatia).

Poetics and Plant Medicine: This yearlong public reading series brings together poets, experimental prose writers, and scholars working at the intersection of aesthetics and psychedelic culture. Through cross-disciplinary conversations, “Poetics and Plant Medicine” aims to speak to audiences both within and outside the academy. Events will feature creative readings and critical dialogues that encourage inclusive, intellectually rigorous explorations of psychedelics in a time of cultural transition.

Stephanie Young is Associate Teaching Professor at Mills College at Northeastern University. Her books of poetry and prose include Ursula or University, It’s No Good Everything’s Bad, and Pet Sounds, which received a Lambda Literary Award. Her current manuscript traverses higher education in post-austerity, evolving psychedelic subcultures, and the making of new kinships. An excerpt appears in Bæst: A Journal of Queer Forms and Affects. Her scholarship has been published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, American Literary History, and the Post45 Data Collective. She is co-author of Crowd Control: Riot and Literary Reward, forthcoming from Columbia University Press. She serves on the Krupskaya Books editorial collective and co-authors the Substack Touch of Grey with Clive Worsley. Young is a member of Sacred Garden Community Church.

Young will co-curate the series with Ramsey McGlazer, who is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. He is the Senior Editor of Critical Times and the author of Old Schools: Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress (2020), which won the American Association for Italian Studies First Book Prize in 2021. McGlazer has translated a number of books from Spanish, including, most recently, Rita Segato’s The War Against Women (2025), and his public writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, Parapraxis, and Post45 Contemporaries. He is working on a book about aesthetics and radical psychiatry, especially in Italy and Brazil.

Psychedelics and Synesthesia: An ethnographic research project that investigates how psychedelic users narrate synesthetic experiences and challenges the default framing of these phenomena as hallucinations. The study explores how cultural context shapes interpretations of psychedelic perception, particularly in relation to sound, movement, and ritual with the key output being an audio essay, drawing from interviews and soundscape recordings.

Roshanak Kheshti is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, Kheshti’s work engages feminist and queer theory, critical race studies, sound studies, and performance ethnography. Kheshti is the author of Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (NYU, 2015), Switched-On Bach (Bloomsbury 33 ⅓, 2019) and We See with the Skin (Duke UP, forthcoming). Current research focuses on synesthesia, psychedelics, and sensory methodologies, with an emphasis on comparative ethnography and non-visual ways of knowing.

Shulgin Archive Exhibit at UC Berkeley: A public exhibit crafted from the archives of Ann and Alexander Shulgin, exploring the history of MDMA. This exhibit will bring vital awareness to the Shulgins’ singular role in psychedelic history. We hope this project will serve as an entrée to a groundbreaking effort to preserve local psychedelic history within UC Berkeley’s archival holdings.

David Presti is a professor of neuroscience at UC Berkeley, where he has taught biology and psychology for more than 30 years.  He has doctorates in molecular biology and in clinical psychology, and is author of Foundational Concepts in Neuroscience: A Brain-Mind Odyssey and Mind Beyond Brain: Buddhism, Science, and the Paranormal, and creator of the public-education course Psychedelics and the Mind. 

Presti is joined by Wendy Tucker, daughter of Ann Shulgin, who spent many years working closely with Sasha Shulgin on his research. She owns Transform Press, and manages a chiropractic office. Tucker has spearheaded the effort to preserve the Shulgin Farm and founded The Shulgin Foundation in 2023, a nonprofit dedicated to that work. She currently serves as its Board Chair and Executive Director. Other project contributors include Alysiana Carter, a doctoral student at the Graduate Theological Union, brings scholarly and archival expertise to the project, supporting research, annotation, and communications, and Peter Vitale, an advisor to the Shulgin Foundation with over two decades of expertise in psychedelic heritage, media, and community organizing.

Flourish Scholar

Beatrice De Faveri is a third-year PhD student in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at UC Berkeley, specializing in Egyptology. She received both her BA and MA in Italy, in classical archaeology (University of Padua) and ancient cultures (University of Bologna) respectively. Since 2019, she has been a member of the archaeological mission to Qift of the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale (IFAO). Her main research interests lie in ancient Egyptian magical and funerary texts, with a special focus on the study of rituals. Her research also extends to the relationship between ancient Egyptian ritual texts and the material culture produced by the performance of ritual practices.

Her project, “Psychotropic Substances in Ancient Egypt Ritual Practices,” seeks to enhance understanding of the use of psychotropic substances in ancient Egyptian rituals. It will focus on researching the ritualistic use of the lotus flower and mandrake within the contexts of funerary, magical, and religious texts.

Flourish Fellow

Charles Hirschkind is a professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley. His research interests concern religious practice, media technologies, and emergent forms of political community in the Middle East and Europe. His published books include The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (Columbia, 2006), Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and his Interlocutors (co-edited with David Scott, Stanford, 2005), and The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia (Chicago, 2020).

His Flourish Fellowship project, “Sensorium, Embodiment, and Modes of Perception: a Case Study of a Psychedelic Church” contrasts spiritual and material perceptions of psychedelic experiences within the Ayahuasca religion Santo Daime in Brazil and the U.S. It studies perceptual modes and body techniques through fieldwork and ethnographic filmmaking.

Flourish Scholar

Kyle Jackson is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. His research interests include the political economy and culture of the 19th-century Americas, the international engagement of the American South, and the US in the world more broadly. His dissertation project, Port of Call to Arms: New Orleans and the Greater Caribbean in the Long Nineteenth Century, examines the rise of US global power through the prism of a city that was a focal point for the emergence of US imperialism and pan-American capitalism.

Exploring the roots of psychedelic subcultures in urban Americas, his project, “Searching for Psychedelic Experiences in Nineteenth-Century Cities,” involves preliminary research in New Orleans, laying the groundwork for a broader transnational study comparing psychedelic movements across Western Hemisphere cities.

Flourish Fellow

Diana Negrín da Silva, PhD is a geographer, educator, and curator who currently teaches in the departments of Geography and Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Her work is anchored to her lifelong dialogue between California and Jalisco, where she was raised and continues to conduct the bulk of her scholarship and teaching. Since 2003, she has conducted ethnographic and archival research in the Mexican states of Jalisco, Nayarit, and San Luis Potosí with a primary focus on the social and political activism of Wixárika University students and young professionals, and the politics of race and identity construction in Mexico.  Her current research examines interracial and cross-geographic alliances that mobilize around Indigenous culture and territory, with a specific focus on resource extraction and land use changes in the sacred pilgrimage site of Wirikuta.

Her initiative, “Psychedelic Cultures and  Extractivism in Sacred Territory,” seeks to document the impact of global entheogen commodification on sacred Indigenous lands caused by agro-industrial expansion and peyote tourism with a focus on the preservation of Indigenous rights and the defense of ancestral lands against extractive practices.

Flourish Fellow

Mariavittoria Mangini, PhD, FNP has written extensively on the impact of psychedelic experiences in shaping the lives of her contemporaries and has worked closely with many of the most distinguished investigators in this field. She is one of the founders of the Women’s Visionary Council, a nonprofit organization that supports investigations into non-ordinary forms of consciousness and organizes gatherings of researchers, healers, artists, and activists whose work explores these states.  For the last fifty years, she has been a part of the Hog Farm, a well-known communal family based in Berkeley and in Laytonville, California.

Her “Women’s Visionary Council: Elders’ Oral History Project” initiative, supported by the Flourish Fellowship, aims to recognize and preserve the contributions of psychedelic elders in shaping contemporary psychedelic exploration. The project involves bringing together psychedelic elders and underground guides to record oral histories and document their experiences and practices.

Flourish Fellow

Poulomi Saha is an associate professor of English and co-director of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. They work at the intersections of Asian American studies, psychoanalytic critique, feminist and queer theory, and postcolonial studies. Currently, they are working on “Fascination,” a book about how our cultural obsession with cults reveals what we truly hunger for and how fundamentally cults have shaped spirituality, belonging, race, and the search for higher meaning in America. Their first book, An Empire of Touch: Women’s Political Labor & The Fabrication of East Bengal was awarded the Harry Levin Prize for outstanding first book by the American Comparative Literature Association and the Helen Tartar First Book  Prize. Their work has been published in many academic and public venues, including differences, Interventions, and Signs.
This initiative, “Towards Re-enchantment: Mysticism, Psychedelics, Reimagining Critical Theory,” explores the intersections of mysticism, psychedelics, and critical theory from spiritual, psychoanalytic, and sociological perspectives, aiming to rejuvenate the emancipatory potential of critical theory through the lens of psychedelic experiences.

Flourish Scholar

Liam McEvoy is an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley, majoring in Anthropology and minoring in “Middle Eastern Language & Culture” and “Race and Law.”
 
His project, “Unfurling the ‘Cup of Dreams’: A Blooming Investigation into the Egyptian Blue Lotus” is an inquiry into the psychoactive properties of the sacred Egyptian blue lotus (Nymphaea Caerulea, a water lily that appears extensively throughout the Egyptian Book of the Dead), as well as wellness products formulated with N. Caerulea and other species of water lily.

Flourish Fellow

Darian Longmire, an assistant professor of art practice at UC Berkeley, is a mixed-media artist whose work explores time, space, and techno culture. The Flourish Fellowship project Elastic Magazine, a publication of psychedelic art and literature, is a multidisciplinary and cross-functional collaboration between UC Berkeley and Harvard, with Hillary Brenhouse serving as editor-in-chief. This biannual print magazine will publish a diverse and expansive body of contemporary psychedelic art and writing while also paying tribute to an overlooked archive of psychedelic work by radically innovative artists, writers, and thinkers of color.

Flourish Fellow

Patricia Kubala is a PhD candidate in socio-cultural anthropology at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation project, Psychedelic Reckonings, is a study of how concepts of ancestry, inheritance, and intergenerational transmission animate contemporary practices of working with psychedelics and plant medicines in the U.S. Her research considers not only the promise but also the dilemmas involved in the project of laboring for a psychedelic “otherwise” — for an ethics, therapeutics, and metaphysics adequate to reckoning with planetary ecological crisis and unresolved legacies of epistemic and material colonial and settler-colonial violence.

Her project, “Psychedelic Reckonings: Ancestry, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Transmission in Contemporary Psychedelic and Plant Medicine Practices in the United States,” will explore the increasing salience of multiple figures of ancestry, inheritance and transmission, across bodies, generations, humans and more-than-human-others, the living and the dead, to psychedelic culture in the United States. The fall 2024 symposium at UC Berkeley will cover topics including encounters with ancestors and the dead; the use of plant medicines by Indigenous, Black, and Asian communities in the U.S. to heal intergenerational trauma; and cultural appropriation within White psychedelic culture. Patricia will organize the event in collaboration with Juliana Willars, an Indigenous (Maya and Coahuiltecan descendant) medical anthropologist transitioning into psychotherapy with a focus on healing intergenerational trauma. She comes from a medicine lineage and has served the community through harm reduction education, crisis care at festivals, and agitating at numerous conferences about the disparity of access to psychedelics for Indigenous peoples and other marginalized populations and their lack of inclusion in policy-making.