Emily Pothast is a multimedia artist, musician, writer, and historian whose research-based practice considers intertwined dynamics of embodied experience, material culture, temporality, politics, and belief. She holds an MFA with an emphasis in printmaking from the University of Washington and is currently a PhD student in Historical and Cultural Studies of Religion at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Her doctoral research examines the reception history of ancient apocalyptic literature through a lens informed by art and media theory.

Formerly the Director of the Antique and Modern Print Department at Davidson Galleries in Seattle, Emily is a scholar of early print culture, with a particular interest in the social, economic, and religious transformations afforded by the development of the printing press in the mid fifteenth century.  She also has a research interest in early film and other transitional moments in the history of technological media, and has completed graduate coursework in film & media studies at UC Berkeley.

As the cofounder of the musical projects Hair and Space Museum and Midday Veil, Emily has released multiple albums and performed extensively. She is a regular contributor to experimental music magazine The Wire; her writing has appeared in many other publications including Art In America, Hyperallergic, Jacobin, Maggot Brain, Monday, and The Stranger. She has taught courses at University of Washington and Graduate Theological Union, given guest lectures at UC Berkeley, Seattle University, and Osnabrück University, and is currently the assistant editor of the academic journal Teaching Theology and Religion. 

Emily's chapter "Magic, Money, Ink, and Blood: Mediating the Social Body in the Case of Simon of Trent" appears in the edited volume Religious Dimensions of Conspiracy Theories: Comparing and Connecting Old and New Trends (Routledge, 2023). 

Research interests: Biblical and apocryphal literature in its historical context(s), reception history, apocalypticism, history of printing , film and media theory, sound studies, music, politics, mysticism, visionary art, psychedelics and religion, conspiracy theories, Satanic panics.

Photo by Valerie Calano