Nathan Jumper

Area of Focus: Religion and Culture

Education

M.Div., Princeton Theological Seminary, 2016
M.M., Temple University, 2010 (dual master’s degree)
B.S./B.A., Cairn University, 2006 (dual bachelor’s degree)

Research Interests

Religion and technology
Metaphysics (post-Heideggerian)
Psychedelic philosophy
Afrofuturism
Post-secularism

Professional Biography

The backdrop of my research is the “crisis of the European subject” (Kristeva). What comes after the deconstruction of the subject-as-substance of classical metaphysics? And what comes after the deconstruction of this deconstruction, namely, the subject-as-ideology of postmodernism? My research pursues this question by exploring a range of issues at the intersection of religion, modernity, technology, and race.

My dissertation specifically examines structural analogies between psychedelic and afro-futurist discourses in terms of how they deploy mystical logics that contest the “metaphysical infrastructure” of modernity (Chandler). The project introduces a framework to understand these discourses not merely as solutions to empirical technological and psychological problems, but as procedures that situate the subject in relation to the infinite. My research draws on these discursive traditions to ask the question of how the subject is being reconstituted—whether through psychedelic experience or postcolonial practice—in a post-secular age.

Publications

“Micheaux, Oscar,” in Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, De Gruyter Press, 2019.

“Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates: Emergent History and a Gospel of Middle-Class Liberation.” The Bible In Motion: A Handbook of Biblical Reception in Film, De Gruyter Press, 2016.

Awards

Stephens Family Fund for Graduate Student Excellence in the Humanities, Fine Arts, and Social Sciences, 2019

Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fellowship (Finalist) UNC Chapel Hill, 2017

Archibald Alexander Hodge Award in Systematic Theology, Princeton Theological Seminary, 2015

Edwin B. Garringues Scholarship, Boyer College of Music and Dance at Temple University, 2009