Center for Metanoia Studies (Centre d'Etudes Interdisciplinaires de la Métanoïa)

The second annual symposium of the Center for Metanoia Studies will take place on December 15-16, 2025 at All Souls College, Oxford.

Attendee registration is now open here.

Programme

Monday, 15 December 2025    

9:00-9:30 Registration and coffee       

9:30-9:45 Welcome

9:45-11:15 Panel 1

Kate Cooper & Hildelith F. Leyser, Narrative, change, and transformative experience

Sergio Gadea, Love for one’s neighbour as secular conversion: agape in the post-Christian era

11:15–11:30 Break

11:30–13:00 Panel 2       

Kevin Gary, Despair and transformation

Alexis de La Ferrière, The constant carnival: social dedifferentiation as a barrier to personal transformation

13:00–14:00 Lunch         

14:00–14:45 Café littéraire avec Charles Wright

14:45–17:00 Panel 3

Heather Krasker, Conversion and its false pretences: the example of actresses (18th-19th centuries)

Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa, The Science of Religion and the Mystic Fable in Friedrich Max Müller’s Indology

Matthew Croasmun, Working from parody to the real: shifting hypergoods in the pluralistic undergraduate classroom

17:00–17:30 Break

17:30–18:30 Keynote address

Ruth Harris, Theosophists in Search of a Messiah?

19:30 Dinner in College (for speakers)         

Tuesday, 16 December 2025

9:00–10:30 Panel 4         

Laurent Chabert, From spiritual revolution to institutional reform: Emmanuel Mounier’s Personalism and the birth of Institutional Psychotherapy

Charles Mercier, Personal and institutional transformations within the French academic world in 1968: the example of René Rémond and the University of Nanterre

10:30–10:45 Break

10:45–13:00 Panel 5

Elyamine Settoul, The Experience of Military Commitment as Metanoia: Anthropological, Ritual, and Identity Analogies

Frédéric Rouvière, Les expériences mystiques des philosophes, une hypothèse sur l’heuristique des concepts

Vincent Forray, Legal forms and transformations of persons: the strange case of civil status

13:00–14:00 Lunch         

14:00–14:45 Café littéraire avec Marion Muller-Colard 

14:45–16:15 Panel 6

Julien Argoud, Trajectories of conversion from Islam to Christianity in Morocco

Gauthier Simon, The heuristic analogy of religious conversion to understand ecological transformation

16:15–16:45 Break

16:45–18:00 Conclusions and Horizons

Adam Ellwanger

Alexis de La Ferrière

PARTICIPANTS

Keynote Speaker

Ruth Harris, Professor of History, Oxford

Panelists

Julien Argoud, Political Science, Sciences Po Paris

Laurent Chabert, Criminology, Université catholique de Lille

Kate Cooper, History, Royal Holloway

Matthew Croasmun, Theology, Yale

Alexis de La Ferrière, Sociology, Royal Holloway

Adam Ellwanger, English, Houston-Downtown

Vincent Forray, Law, Sciences Po Paris

Sergio Gadea SJ, Philosophy, Comillas

Kevin Gary, Philosophy, Hillsdale College

Heather Krasker, History, EPHE Paris

Hildelith F. Leyser, Neuroscience, McGill

Charles Mercier, History, Université de Bordeaux

Marion Muller-Colard, Author, Theologian and Editor

Frédéric Rouvière, Law, Aix-Marseille Université

Elyamine Settoul, Political Science, CNAM Paris

Gauthier Simon, History, Université de Bordeaux

Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa, History, Oxford

Charles Wright, Author