Samuel Jayasi
B.A. College of the Holy Cross
Samuel received his BA from The College of the Holy Cross in Russian Studies with a focus on 19th-century works and mysticism, along with a minor in Physics. He is interested in understanding the Russian collective consciousness from the medieval era to the present and how historical experiences have cultivated phenomena between ideology and religion. His undergraduate thesis focused on the observation of time and space and their relationship with human consciousness during a historical period of heavy collective religiosity. By mapping a physical representation through time of Eugene Vodolazkin’s Laurus, he demonstrated the cyclical nature of the medieval mindset and the collective historical shift towards postmodernism in Russia. These explorations have directed his focus towards observing the collective participation in rituals and shamanism throughout early Slavic cultures, as manifested in folklore and literary phenomena.