Dr. Reed Carlson

Rev. Dr. Reed Carlson specializes in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and the literature of Second Temple Judaism—a diverse body of writings that includes the Dead Sea Scrolls, early Jewish Pseudepigrapha, and the deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament (Apocrypha). His current research focuses on accounts of spirits and ecstatic religious experiences in biblical and Second Temple Jewish literature—especially as they relate to anthropological and ethnographic studies of possession, trance, and other similar practices in the Global South and its diasporas. His recently published book is entitled Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible: Possession and Other Spirit Phenomena (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022).