Teaching Fellow (2025–2027)
Research Fellow (2024–2028)

Marleen Thaler is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Department of Religious Studies, University of Graz (2025–2028), a Teaching Fellow (2025–2026), and a Research Fellow (2024–2028) at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Vienna. She is also the Editorial Manager at the University's Research Centre "Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society" (RaT). She studied Religious Studies (M.A. 2019; Ph.D. 2024), Oriental Studies (B.A. 2017), and Social and Cultural Anthropology (B.A. 2013) at the University of Vienna and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. From 2019 to 2022, she was an FWF Fellow at the Department of Religious Studies, University of Vienna, and has been a visiting scholar at ETH Zürich (2022), UC Riverside (2022), and UC Santa Barbara (2023). She recently co-edited a volume on Subtle Energies (Brill) and is completing her monograph on John Michell’s Sacred Place Theory (Equinox). Her main research interests include the transformation of religion, alternative religious currents, the modern history of yoga, religion and technology, eco-spirituality, religious traditionalism, and religion and drugs. As a Research Fellow at the Department of Religious Studies, she explores the use of machines in alternative religion.