Psychedelics and the Specter of Mind Control

Join us for a panel discussion with Rebecca Lemov, Christian Greer, Tom O’Neill, and Benjamin Breen.

About the Speakers

Benjamin Breen is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz specializing in the history of science, medicine, globalization, and the impacts of technological change. His most recent book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science (Grand Central, 2024), is a revisionist history of the first era of psychedelic science. It was named one of the best books of the year by the New Yorker and the Chronicle of Higher Education and won the PROSE award from the Association of American Publishers for best book in the history of science, technology and medicine.

J. Christian Greer is a Lecturer in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. A scholar of religious studies with a special focus on psychedelic culture, he holds an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School as well as an MA and PhD in Western Esotericism from the University of Amsterdam. He is also the co-founder and currently the co-chair of the "Drugs and Religion" program unit at the American Academy of Religion. His forthcoming book, Angelheaded Hipsters: Psychedelic Militancy in Nineteen Eighties North America (Oxford University Press), explores the expansion of psychedelic culture within fanzine networks in the late Cold War era.

Rebecca Lemov is Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. Her research focuses on key episodes and experiments in the history of the human and behavioral sciences. Her recent book, The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyperpersuasion, uncovers the history of brainwashing—and its troubling implications for today. Her other books include Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (how scientists between 1942 and 1963 attempted to map the elusive and subjective parts of the human psyche via once-futuristic data-storage techniques) and World As Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men (about the scientific dream of behavioral engineering).

Tom O’Neill is an award-winning investigative journalist and entertainment reporter whose work has appeared in national publications such as Us, Premiere, New York, the Village Voice and Details. His book, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, was published by Little, Brown in 2019.