The thinkers behind the lens
Scholars
A scholar page is a hub, not a biography. Each surfaces the concepts a thinker gave Vela and the books of theirs in the library. (For literary authors read across a body of work, see authors; for Vela’s production roster, see writers — those are different surfaces.)
- Émile Durkheim1858-1917sociology
Founder of academic sociology; gives Vela the vocabulary for what a community does to the person inside it — effervescence, anomie, the sacred/profane line.
- Max Weber1864-1920sociology · political-economy
Names how authority is held and how it decays — charismatic authority and its routinization — the load-bearing frame for reading early-church leadership.
- Michel Foucault1926-1984philosophy · sociology
The genealogist of power-through-visibility; gives Vela biopower and the panopticon — how surveillance becomes self-surveillance, central to the Christianity-and-shame arc.
- Lisa Feldman Barrett1963-psychology · neuroscience
The leading voice of constructionist emotion theory; emotions as situated constructions rather than basic kinds — the spine of Vela's emotion-research lens.
- Antonio Damasio1944-neuroscience
Reattached feeling to the body and to reason; the somatic-marker hypothesis grounds Vela's somatic-charge thread in writing and emotion work.
- Paul Ekman1934-psychology
The basic-emotions position constructionism reads against; the discrete-kinds account of emotion that frames the field's central debate.
- Silvan Tomkins1911-1991psychology
Affect theory's originator; named shame as a primary affect distinct from guilt — load-bearing for Vela's shame-family work and the Augustine pillar.
- Henri Tajfel1919-1982social-psychology
Social identity theory and the minimal-group paradigm; the experimental account of in-group/out-group formation behind the Galatians group-dynamics reading.
- Jonathan Haidt1963-social-psychology
Moral foundations theory; the six-foundation account of moral intuition that Vela cites for the dispositional contrast to situational moral experience.
- Daniel J. Siegel1957-psychology · neuroscience
Interpersonal neurobiology; the window of tolerance gives Vela the arousal-band vocabulary behind the Pennebaker exercise and trauma-writing rationale.
- Barbara Rosenwein1945-sociology · anthropology
Historian of emotion; emotional communities reframes feeling as plural and period-specific — foundational for Vela's emotion-historiography frame.
- Damon Centola1975-sociology · social-psychology
Network science of behavior change; complex contagion explains why some adoptions need multiple reinforcing ties — the spine of the network-mediated-adoption thesis.