Dr. Julie Chajes 

Research Fellow

Scientific Biography:

I am a scholar of nineteenth-century Britain and America specialising in the literature of new religious movements and how it advanced and expressed broader cultural, literary, scholarly, and scientific trends. My first book, Recycled Lives (Oxford University Press, 2019) contextualises the reincarnation doctrines of Helena P. Blavatsky (1831-1891), the founder of the Theosophical Society, an esoteric movement that has influenced art, literature and spirituality the world over until the present day. My most recent articles are “The Silent Treatment: Helena P. Blavatsky’s The Voice of The Silence and the Construction of Theosophical Scripture” (Nova Religio, 2024) and “Nothing Personal: Blavatsky and Her Indian Interlocutors” (Numen 2021). I am currently preparing a paper on genre in Theosophical literature and working on a book about the letters of the early twentieth-century occultist, Max Theon.