Tanya Luhrmann is the Watkins University Professor in the Anthropology Department at Stanford University, the author of When God Talks Back, and co-editor and contributor to Our Most Troubling Madness: Case Studies in Schizophrenia across Cultures. She has done

ethnography on the streets of Chicago with homeless and psychotic women, and worked with people who hear voices in Chennai, Accra and the South Bay. She has also done fieldwork with evangelical Christians who seek to hear God speak back, with Zoroastrians who set out to create a more mystical faith, and with people who practice magic. She uses a combination of ethnographic and experimental methods to understand the phenomenology of unusual sensory experiences, the way ideas about minds and persons shape them, and what we can learn from this social shaping that can help us to help those whose voices are distressing.