Stephen T. Asma is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College Chicago, where he is a Senior Fellow of the Research Group in Mind, Science and Culture.
Stephen Asma is the author of ten books, including Why We Need Religion (Oxford Univ. Press, 2018), The Emotional Mind: Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition (with Dr. Rami Gabriel, Harvard Univ. Press, April 2019), The Evolution of Imagination (Univ. of Chicago, 2017), On Monsters: an Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (Oxford Univ. Press, 2009) and The Gods Drink Whiskey (HarperOne, 2005).
He writes regularly for the New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Aeon magazine.
In 2014, he was a Fulbright scholar at Beijing Foreign Studies University, PRC. In 2003, he was Visiting Professor at the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh, Kingdom of Cambodia, and in 2007 he lived and studied in Shanghai China.
Asma has been an invited lecturer at Harvard, Oxford, Brown University, the Field Museum, University of Chicago, the University of Amsterdam, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Fudan University (Shanghai), Xi’an Jiaotong University, Aarhus University Denmark, University of Macau, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and many more. Check media appearances.
In 2018, Asma was awarded a three-year Henry Luce Foundation grant, The Public Theologies of Technology and Presence program. He is studying friendship in the digital age. Institute of Buddhist Studies, Berkeley CA.
Stephen Asma was a professional musician in Chicago for many years, playing with such legends as Bo Diddley and Buddy Guy.