ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the product—and in a certain sense, the record—of a multitude of fortuitous conversations and collaborations. Thanks are due, first of all, to Clayton Crockett, whose stubborn insistence that I find something to say at a conference on energy threw me into the apophatic expanse of cosmic acceleration, which opened in turn onto the strange worlds of the multiverse. Having had very little advanced training in the natural sciences, I am grateful for the guidance and gentle corrections of Marcelo Gleiser, Laura Mersini-Houghton, Jamie Hinderks, Joe Rouse, Bill Herbst, Kirk Wegter-McNelly, Whitney Bauman, and especially Brian Wecht, who read the introduction and physics chapters with more care than I could have dared to request.

Other friends and colleagues provided invaluable orientation as I found myself wandering through their fields of expertise; my thanks to Elizabeth Castelli, Eirene Visvardi, Tushar Irani, and Andy Szegedy-Maszak for their help with the classical material; Constance Leidy for her mathematical breakdown of infinity; Michael Granada for clarifying late Renaissance cosmology; Jenna Supp-Montgomerie for her work on “worlds” in the American technoreligious imagination; Cate Williamson for introducing me to multiverse cosmologies in narrative theory; Liz Lerman for getting me to dance out the stages of cosmic expansion; Charles Jencks for talking me through his glorious Garden of Cosmic Speculation at Portrack, Scotland; and Alistair Clark, head gardener, for walking me through it.

This admittedly strange and syncretic project would have remained an inchoate set of potential connections were it not for the patience, energy, and brilliance of my students at Wesleyan—especially the members of my “Worlding” seminars in the fall semesters of 2010 and 2011. My research has been supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a fellowship at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Humanities, then under the directorship of Jill Morawski. It has benefitted immensely from the generosity and solidarity of my colleagues in the Religion Department and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program; from the assistance of Rhonda Kissinger; and from the scrutiny of a number of working groups on campus—many thanks in this regard to Margot Weiss, Matthew Garrett, Joseph Fitzpatrick, Nima Bassiri, Isaac Kamola, Liza McAlister, Annalise Glauz-Todrank, Laura Harrington, Justine Quijada, Attiya Ahmad, Jennifer Tucker, Christina Crosby, and Lori Gruen. I am also grateful to Kendall Hobbs, Susanne Javorski, Diane Klare, Suzy Taraba, and Katherine Wolfe in the libraries at Wesleyan; to John Wareham and Kevin Wiliarty in Information Technology Services; to Annie Barva for her meticulous copyediting; and to Wendy Lochner, Christine Dunbar, and Irene Pavitt at Columbia University Press for their careful attention to the manuscript throughout the publication process.

I managed to clarify the prose of particularly tricky sections thanks to scrupulous readings by Lisa Cohen, Elizabeth Salzer, Andrew Aghapour, Wayne Proudfoot, and Helen Ashley. Veronica Warren provided enthusiastic and invaluable assistance with subtitles, scansion, and epigraphs. Isaac Rubenstein did his best to keep the prose from being too boring. Kenan Rubenstein drew and designed the cover; illustrated the “quilted,” “inflationary,” and “connected” multiverses; and talked me through so many conceptual and stylistic difficulties that I no longer know which ideas were his to begin with. And I relied throughout the course of this project on the patience and encouragement of Keera Bhandari, who found articles, read and improved chapters, and augmented my own excitement about the cosmological entanglement of physics and metaphysics.

Finally, I am indebted beyond measure to Catherine Keller, whose work has shaped nearly every part of this project, who responded with characteristic clarity to recalcitrant paragraphs and numerous drafts, and whose tireless encouragement made this whole thing seem, impossibly, possible.