Biography
Ira Helderman PhD is Adjunct Professor of Religion, Psychology, and Culture at Vanderbilt University. His research examines how psychotherapists’ definitions of what is and is not religious shape their understandings of caregiving, health, and illness. His monograph Prescribing the Dharma: Psychotherapists, Buddhist Traditions, and Defining Religion is the first comprehensive examination of the surprisingly diverse ways that psychotherapists have approached Buddhist traditions. His current book project, with working title Sick of Meditation: Adverse Meditation Effects and Psychotherapists between Mental Illness and Religious Experience, is a history and ethnography exploring how psychotherapists have responded to distressing meditation experiences.
Dr. Helderman is also a practicing psychotherapist who has worked in the mental health field for over 25 years in a variety of settings from in-patient addiction treatment centers and psychiatric hospitals to his current private practice.
Candidate Statement
When I was first asked if I had the willingness to be put up for this service position, I felt a fair bit of hesitation. It’s true that I’ve always been highly concerned with the state of contingent faculty today, especially given the current shifting and unstable landscape of religious studies and the humanities more broadly. But my own situation has always seemed to me relatively unique: religious studies and academics is actually a second career for me, and I have maintained my full-time “day job” as a psychotherapist throughout, first working toward an additional religious studies degree, then taking up adjunct teaching, continuing my research and publishing, etc. But it does make sense to me how this experience might offer something of a perspective as so many contingent faculty also take up additional careers. Offering resources to religious studies scholars who seek to simultaneously explore multiple vocational interests does seem like something that would be worth bringing more intention to as a field. If I can be helpful in this regard, I would be glad to contribute that perspective to the work of the committee.