13 April 2023
Brennan Kettelle holds a master’s degree in Gender & Cultural Studies (Simmons University, 2018, cum laude), as well as a research master’s degree in Religious Studies, with a focus on Western esotericism (University of Amsterdam, 2021, cum laude). Her thesis on the intersections of Satanic tropes and feminist film analysis during her first MA programme developed into a budding academic curiosity regarding the study of esotericism, leading her to the HHP in Amsterdam in 2019. Presently, Brennan is conducting PhD research at the HHP; a continuation of her rMA research, Brennan is investigating historical associations between the demoness Lilith and queerness within nineteenth-century artistic, literary, and sociopolitical discourses.
Her PhD project "Her Dark Breath: Queer Currents within Nineteenth-Century Discourses on Lilith" is supervised by Marco Pasi and Manon Hedenborg White.
Brennan aims to utilize queer theories and methodologies in examining esotericism, investigating both queer currents within esoteric literature, orders, and figures, as well as esoteric themes within queer subcultures, politics, and histories. Brennan is also currently researching the lesbian-pagan poetess Renée Vivien, analyzing the occult influences of her queer, Satanic oeuvre. Her other research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century occultism, sex magic, esotericism and politics, and conspirituality.
Tjalling Janssen holds an RMA degree in Religious Studies from the University of Amsterdam (2022, cum laude), in which he specialised in Esotericism. He started his PhD project with the HHP and ASH in January 2023, which centers around the concept of elemental beings. These entities were believed by some during the early modern period to reside in the elements of water, air, earth and fire. He already conducted research on the topic of elemental beings in his RMA thesis by investigating the instability of gendered descriptions in the reception of the concept from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth century. In the PhD project he shifts the focus to environmental history, researching how this concept was embedded in natural-philosophical, magical and early literary discourses from the Renaissance up to the eve of the Enlightenment, and what this can tell us about the relationship between humans and the natural world.
Tjalling Janssen's PhD project "Envoys of the Macrocosm: Elemental Beings & the Relationship Between Humans & the Natural World in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Thought" is supervised by Wouter Hanegraaff and Peter Forshaw.