Keynote Speakers
100 Years Rudolf Steiner
2025 Keynote Speakers
Harvard's Program for the Evolution of Spirituality was pleased to host three keynote presentations by four distinguished speakers: Henry Holland, Aaron French, Boaz Huss, and Martina Maria Sam at our 100 Years Rudolf Steiner Conference. Amidst an overwhelming number of strong proposals, these presentations stood out for their insight, relevance, and depth, and promise to enrich the spirit and focus of the gathering.
Find more information, see the pages for our Conference Schedule and Panels and Papers.
2025 Keynote Presentations
Date: Sunday, December 14, 2025
Time: 17:00-21:00
Location: The Sheraton Commander Hotel, 16 Garden St, Cambridge, MA
In this lecture we narrate how Steiner’s two major autobiographical texts – My Life’s Course, serialized in the pages of the Goetheanum from December 1923, and the lecture given in February 1913 to the newly-founded Anthroposophical Society – were responses to malicious public polemics. We further explore how both writings color his reception until today, among readers and scholars of all hues. Seeing Steiner and his community as co-shapers of historical processes, rather than as mere victims – their opponents’ commitment to violence notwithstanding – we then zoom out to show how third-party descriptions of Steiner’s person and companions, from the 1890s and steadily through until after Steiner’s death, stamped him as an arriviste, whose popular challenge to dominant knowledge systems was well worth opposing. Aware that knowledge about anthroposophy and Steiner is created out of the societal positions of adherents, opponents, and researchers – and mindful that all research positions consist of privilege and oppression in unequal measures – we conclude by returning to our opening question: How are understandings of Steiner and his work formed in the mirror of biographical imaginations?
Watch Henry Holland and Aaron French's keynote
Henry Holland
Aaron French and Henry Holland have been researching and writing for three years on a new biography, under contract with State University of New York Press: Modernity's Provocateur: The Young Rudolf Steiner and the Rebirth of Outsider Philosophy (scheduled for publication 2027). This follows Aaron's published monograph Max Weber, Rudolf Steiner, and Modern Western Esotericism: A Transcultural Approach (Routledge, 2025). Henry, an accomplished scholarly translator and editor, who has also been a Translation Fellow at Yale University's Fortunoff Archive of Holocaust Testimonies, first published in this field in 2023, in German Studies Review, on "Overlapping Epistemologies in the Thought and Lives of Ernst Bloch and Rudolf Steiner." This will be followed by an extended chapter on "Anti-Racist and Racist Agency in the Work and Thought of Rudolf Steiner and the Anthroposophical Movement," for the Bloomsbury Handbook of Steiner-Waldorf Education (postprint, scheduled 2026), ed. Jo Fraser-Pearce, to which Aaron is also contributing an important chapter on " Max Weber and Rudolf Steiner: Sociological Contemporaries."
Aaron French
Parallel to the numerous peer-reviewed articles Aaron has published on the history and present of anthroposophy and western esotericism, and his regular YouTube outreach work on the same subjects, Henry writes regularly for perhaps the only essayistic and edited magazine on Nietzsche today, NietzschePOParts. With Aaron's position in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen, and Henry based in Hamburg in northern Germany, the two don't have far to travel to embark on further field trips. These journey through still unmapped territory regarding the perennially intriguing and contested subject of their biography.
Date: Monday, December 15, 2025
Time: 07:30-8:45pm
Location: Cader Room
Rudolf Steiner, who was previously known as a Goethe editor and author of philosophical and literary works, surprised his contemporaries when, from the age of 40, he appeared as a spiritual teacher seeking to build on Western spiritual traditions, German Idealism in particular. What makes someone a spiritual teacher? What inner impulses moved him from an early age? What challenges – trials, life crises, experiences of failure – did he encounter on his path? Based on the comprehensive study of original sources and of Rudolf Steiner’s own words, this talk will provide an outline of the first forty years of his life.
Watch Dr. Martina Maria Sam's keynote
Dr. Martina Maria Sam
Dr. Martina Maria Sam studied sociology and political science at Heidelberg University, eurythmy and Waldorf education at Witten, and German language and literature and art history at Basel University. She worked for four years as an eurythmist on the Goetheanum stage and has been involved since 1989 in the publication of Rudolf Steiner’s Complete Works. From 1997 to 2012, she was head of the Humanities Section at the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum. In 2010, she received her doctorate from the University of Zurich with a thesis on Rudolf Steiner's reception of Goethe’s Faust. Since 2011 her research has focused on the early biography of Rudolf Steiner, and she has published her research in two books and numerous articles. Since 2018, she has contributed as a commentator to the edition of Rudolf Steiner's letters. In 2019, she published a catalogue of Rudolf Steiner's Library.
Date: Tuesday, December 16, 2025
Time: 09:00-10:00am
Location: Cader Room
Anthroposophy has become a significant presence in contemporary Israeli society. Two branches of the Anthroposophical Society operate in Israel, along with an Anthroposophical kibbutz in the Upper Galilee. Waldorf education, based on Steiner’s pedagogical principles, is highly popular, with hundreds of Waldorf kindergartens, schools, and training centers across the country. In addition, several Anthroposophical remedial homes and villages support people with special needs. The widespread success of Anthroposophy in Israel raises intriguing questions. How did the spiritual teachings of Rudolf Steiner, rooted in Western esoteric traditions and incorporating numerous Christological themes, resonate within Israeli Jewish society? How do Israeli Anthroposophists engage with Steiner’s negative views on Judaism and Zionism?
This lecture will explore the reception history of Anthroposophy in Israel, from its beginnings in Mandate Palestine to the present, focusing on the efforts of Israeli Anthroposophists to reconcile their Jewish and Israeli identities with their Anthroposophical commitments.
Boaz Huss
Boaz Huss is the Aron Bernstein Chair in Jewish History in the Department of Jewish Thought and serves as the chair of the Goldstein-Goren International Center for Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University. His research focuses on the history of Kabbalah, Western esotericism, New Age culture, and new religious movements in Israel. Huss's recent publications include Mystifying Kabbalah: Academic Scholarship, National Theology, and New Age Spirituality (Oxford University Press, 2020), The Cosmic Movement: Sources, Contexts, Impact (Bialik Press, 2021, co-authored with Julie Chajes) and The Secret Doctrine of the Jew: Jewish Theosophists and the Kabbalah (SUNY Press, 2025).
