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

On Monday December 15^th, Ruth Harris will be delivering the keynote lecture for our annual Metanoia Symposium.

Professor Harris will explore the Theosophical Society’s restless search for a modern Messiah, a quest that fused global spirituality with radical politics. Focusing on the trajectory of Annie Besant, Harris traces how obsessions with Incarnation, reincarnation, and personal transformation shaped the movement’s ambitions and controversies. Harris will also consider the relationship between Besant, her clairvoyant collaborator, C. W. Leadbeater, and the young Indian boy they proclaimed the “Chosen Vehicle,” Jiddu Krishnamurti, who ultimately renounced messianic expectations to become a celebrated “new age” philosopher. The lecture offers a vivid look at the hopes, illusions, and transformative visions that propelled Theosophy onto the world stage at the turn of the XX^th century.

Ruth Harris’s research centres on the history of modern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She writes interdisciplinary cultural history that brings together the histories of religion, gender, medicine, and science.

She is currently engaged in a major project on religious revival that traces the intellectual and spiritual exchanges between South Asia and the West. She has published on Gandhi and Romain Rolland, is exploring the Indian origins of Albert Schweitzer’s notion of “reverence for life,” and is undertaking new work on Anagarika Dharmapala, Vivekananda, and their influence on Western thought. Her most recent book is “Guru to the World: the Life and Legacy of Vivekananda (2022).”

Her early work examined the emergence of the “insanity defence” in Paris, a moment when new ideas about unconscious mental activity and criminal anthropology unsettled established notions of legal responsibility. She then turned to Catholic revivalism and healing, especially at the shrine of Lourdes. Her third major work, a study of the Dreyfus Affair, investigated what transforms a political scandal into a cause célèbre and analysed the dynamics of political commitment; this book was awarded the Wolfson Prize in 2010. Harris’s publications include The Man on Devil’s Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France (2010), Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (1998), and Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law and Psychiatry (1989).