Christopher Laursen, PhD

Dr. Christopher Laursen, PhD is a social and cultural historian and transdisciplinary researcher who studies how people experience and try to explain extraordinary things that can’t easily be rationalized. His PhD dissertation Reimagining the Poltergeist in Twentieth-Century America and Britain(Department of History, University of British Columbia, 2016) shows how psychokinesis became a mainstream hypothesis to explain the poltergeist phenomenon. >

He has taught on the history of science, environment, religion, and society, as well as media studies, at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and Trent University in Canada. Christopher is currently co-authoring a book on a 200-year-old poltergeist case which contributed to a rural community’s identity with the scholar Rick Fehr. 

His ongoing research considers encounters with non-humans and the natural world, physical anomalies, dreams, precognition, and after death communications as personally and culturally transformative experiences. >