Dr Mari van Emmerik is a Junior Research Fellow in Religion and the Frontier Challenges programme at Pembroke College, the University of Oxford. Her interdisciplinary work explores the nature of mind: empirical research on language and thought, the study of (non)religious cognition, and, most recently, philosophical and theological inquiry into artificial intelligence. Mari began her academic journey with postgraduate studies in Psycholinguistics at the Russian Academy of Sciences and an MA in Applied Linguistics as a Fulbright Scholar at Southern Illinois University. She then completed an MSt and a DPhil in Science and Religion as a Clarendon Scholar at Oxford with her work critically engaging the cognitive science of nonreligion. After completing her doctorate, Mari taught Theology and Science at the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge, and has been co-leading the John Templeton Foundation–funded project "Awe-some Spirituality" which examines how the universal human experience of awe bridges secular and religious spirituality. Her current project at Pembroke brings Christian incarnational theology into conversation with contemporary cognitive science to address digital justice and epistemic diversity in AI.
Research Interests:
Psychology of religion and nonreligion; ethics of AI; the nature of intelligence.
Current Projects:
Embodied Intelligence: Rethinking A(G)I Through the Incarnational Framework
