Olga Louchakova-Schwartz

Olga Louchakova-Schwartz is a philosopher, comparative religionist, and interdisciplinary researcher with backgrounds in transpersonal psychology, medicine, and neuroscience.  Her training included Vedanta, Kundalini Yoga, Orthodox Christian spirituality (Hesychasm), paganism, and Turkish Sufism. She holds the title Professor Emerita from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (1992-2016). Her Hridayam® public health and spirituality program was created in the Russian spiritual underground (1987-1992) and reached more than 5000 people in trauma relief all over the world.  Prior to 1992, as a scientist at the USSR Academy of Sciences, she developed new diagnostic tests for autoimmune diseases of the nervous system. At present, she is the Founding President of the Society for the Phenomenology of Religious Experience, Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the Hult International Business School, Clinical Professor at the University of California at Davis, and adjunct lecturer at the Jesuits School of Theology in Berkeley. A well-known author,  she wrote more than 250 papers and book chapters. Her two books, The Problem of Religious Experience: Case Studies in Phenomenology (editor, Springer 2019), and Image and Imagination in Phenomenology of Religious Experience (Bautz, 2023, with Martin Nitsche) inaugurated phenomenology of religious experience as a special field of studies in the philosophy of religion. She is the founding editor of a new book series Phenomenologies of Religious Experience (Lexington). She is currently working on the book Husserl and Suhrawardi: Reappraising Apodicticity, to be published with Lexington Books in 2023.