Mark Gonnerman
- Ph.D., Religious Studies (Modern Religious Thought), Stanford University, 2004
- M.A., Religious Studies, Stanford University, 1989
- M.Div., Christian Theology and East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1987
- B.A., History and Philosophy, St. Olaf (Paracollege), 1980
Mark Gonnerman, chairs the Global Ph.D. Program in Transpersonal Psychology and holds the rank of assistant professor (2011–). He is interested in spirituality and the American religious imagination, especially as informed by Asian religious traditions. He studies and teaches the lives and works of religious intellectuals such as Henry David Thoreau, William James, Carl Jung, D.T. Suzuki, T. S. Eliot, Paul Tillich, Ernest Becker, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Gary Snyder, Martin Luther King, Jr., Cornel West, and Matthew Fox.
Mark was educated in the Paracollege of St. Olaf College, a tutorial-examination system on the Oxbridge model. During his undergraduate years, he travelled and studied in Egypt, India, Taiwan, Japan, and at the University of Cambridge in England. Following three years of peace education work in Hiroshima, he earned an M.Div. degree at Harvard Divinity School. At Harvard, he was a teaching fellow in the East Asian Studies concentration where for two years he taught the sophomore seminar in premodern Japanese history. His doctorate from Stanford University in modern religious thought was conferred in 2004.
In 1997, Mark created and convened the Mountains & Rivers Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center. This year-long research seminar was organized around Gary Snyder's Buddhist poem cycle, Mountains and Rivers without End (1996). This became the foundation for his Ph.D. dissertation, “On the Path, Off the Trail”: Gary Snyder's Education and the Makings of American Zen (2004). In support of this work, he received a Lieberman Fellowship, a Stanford prize given annually to a graduate student who has shown potential for leadership in the realm of higher education.
From 2002–11, Mark served as founding director of the Aurora Forum at Stanford University. Named for the goddess of dawn, hope, and new beginnings, the Forum featured public conversations with people who turn vision into action for positive social change. Over the years his guests included the Dalai Lama, Robert Thurman, Pico Iyer, Amartya Sen, Cornel West, Jacob Needleman, Parker Palmer, Michael Murphy, Wade Davis, Paul Ehrlich, Steve Reich, Leonard Cohen, Angela Davis, Helen Prejean, Alice Waters, Susannah Heschel, Marthan Nussbaum, Julia Butterfly Hill, Rebecca Solnit, Laurie Anderson, Naomi Klein, and Amy Goodman. Many of these conversations were broadcast on KQED, the Bay Area's National Public Radio station and distributed worldwide via Stanford on iTunes U.
In the past decade, Mark has returned in earnest to the photographic practice that resulted in a college scholarship from Eastman Kodak. At ITP, he will offer a new class on photography as a spiritual practice and teach seminars on William James, spirituality and nonviolent social change in the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr., and other courses that explore various ways transpersonal perspectives encourage, ennoble, and enliven human lives. He loves to inhabit the intersubjective space of teaching and learning and is always interested in exploring with others the insights and ideas that arise out of disciplined spiritual practices, including scholarly inquiry.
Mark has had the good fortune to know excellent teachers and colleagues who have contributed to his formation, especially Connie Gengenbach, Mac Gimse, and Eric Griffiths while at St. Olaf; Jane I. Smith, Gordon Kaufman, David Eckel, and Ezra Vogel at Harvard; Gregory Kaplan, Mark Berkson, Mark Unno, Akiba Lerner, Van Harvey, Lee Yearley, Clayborne Carson, and his dissertation advisor, Carl Bielefeldt, at Stanford. He has also benefited greatly from the generosity of Gary Snyder, Nanao Sakaki, Matt Davis, Richard Kollmar, Bernard LaFayette, Matthew Fox, Cecile Andrews, Meri Mitsuyoshi, Christopher Gonnerman, and many other good souls who demonstrate ways of bringing together body, mind, and spirit for the benefit of all beings, sentient and otherwise.
