Stephen T. Asma

Stephen Asma is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College Chicago, and co-founder of the Research Group in Mind, Science and Culture. He is author of ten books, including The Emotional Mind (Harvard University Press, 2019), The Evolution of Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2017) and On Monsters (Oxford University Press, 2009). He has lectured at Harvard, Oxford, the Smithsonian, University of Chicago, and many more. He writes regularly for the New York Times and Aeon magazine. Asma has lived and taught in Phnom Penh Cambodia, Beijing, and Shanghai China. As a musician Stephen has played live music with Buddy Guy, B.B. King, Bo Diddley, and many more blues and jazz artists. He has also been a part-time professional illustrator for several books, and an award winning plein air painter. In 2014, he was a Fulbright scholar at Beijing Foreign Studies University, PRC. In 2003, he was Visiting Professor at the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh, Kingdom of Cambodia, and in 2007 he lived and studied in Shanghai China. Asma has been an invited lecturer at Harvard, Oxford, Brown University, the Field Museum, University of Chicago, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Fudan University (Shanghai), Xi'an Jiaotong University, Aarhus University Denmark, University of Macau, the Amsterdam Interdisciplinary Centre for Emotion, the Hang Seng Center for Cognitive Studies at University of Sheffield, and many more. In 2018, Asma was awarded a three-year Henry Luce Foundation grant, The Public Theologies of Technology and Presence program. He is studying friendship in the digital age. Institute of Buddhist Studies, Berkeley CA.