Krister Knapp

Teaching Professor and Minor Adviser in History
Coordinator of Crisis & Conflict in Historical Perspective
PhD, Boston College
MA, University of Massachusetts
MA, University of Indiana
BA, Arizona State University
research interests:
  • U.S. National Security
  • Foreign Policy
  • Intelligence
  • Terrorism
  • Counterterrorism
    View All People

    contact info:

    office hours:

    • Wednesdays
    • 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM
    Get Directions

    mailing address:

    • MSC 1062-107-114
    • Washington University
    • One Brookings Drive
    • St. Louis, MO 63130-4899
    image of book cover

    Krister Knapp writes on and teaches courses in US Intellectual History and Conflict and Security Studies. His scholarly research focuses on William James, the renowned psychologist and philosopher.

     

    Books

    William James: Psychical Research and the Challenge of ModernityChapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

    Selected Articles

    "James the Flâneur," The American Scholar 73 (Winter 2004): 160.

    "William James, Spiritualism, and Unconsciousness 'Beyond the Margin,'" Streams of William James 3 (Fall 2001): 1-5.

    "Should Wolves be Reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park?" Illuminare: A Journal in Recreation, Parks, and Leisure Studies 1 (Spring 1993): 66-71.

    William James: Psychical Research and the Challenge of Modernity

    William James: Psychical Research and the Challenge of Modernity

    In this insightful new book on the remarkable William James, the American psychologist and philosopher, Krister Dylan Knapp provides the first deeply historical and acutely analytical account of James's psychical research. While showing that James always maintained a critical stance toward claims of paranormal phenomena like spiritualism, Knapp uses new sources to argue that psychical research held a strikingly central position in James’s life. It was crucial to his familial and professional relationships, the fashioning of his unique intellectual disposition, and the shaping of his core doctrines, especially the will-to-believe, empiricism, fideism, and theories of the subliminal consciousness and immortality.