Ann Taves is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she has held the Cordano Chair in Catholic Studies for the past 10 years. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1983 and taught for more than 20 years at the Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University before to moving to UCSB. She is the author of numerous books and articles, including Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things (Princeton, 2009) and Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, 1999). She is currently working on a book titled Revelatory Events: Experiences and Appraisals in the Emergence of New Spiritual Paths and supervising the interdisciplinary Religion, Experience, and Mind Lab Group at UCSB.