Sharday (she/her) is an Associate Professor in the School of Religion at Queen’s University, Kingston ON, where she researches and teaches on esotericism, occult sciences, and new religious movements. She is interested in working with, and enlivening integrative, non-mechanistic worldviews found within these traditions. Her first book is ‘The Spiritual Significance of Overload Boredom’ (2022; McGill-Queen’s University Press). Her major projects right now are about psychedelic spiritual crises and solutions. With multidisciplinary collaborators, she is synthesizing tools for facilitating and navigating existential distress, recovery and maps for meaning-making. This work begins from a cosmophilic starting point, centring epistemologies of direct gnosis from traditional communities of practice, and integrating academic scientific and humanistic epistemologies. Sharday is involved in a number of academic and other organizations: she is a founding member of the Human Augmentation Research Network, she holds leadership positions at the American Academy of Religion, and she has been Director of Research at the Psychedelic Association of Canada.