Dozens of movies and documentaries about cults are currently streaming on services like Netflix and Hulu, and the number of podcasts and short videos devoted to the subject may be in the hundreds. What explains this explosion of interest? Join Californiamagazine’s Pat Joseph in conversation with Poulomi Saha, who teaches the highly popular course Cults in Popular Culture and is currently working on a book entitled Enthralled, to discuss America’s long obsession with “communities and philosophies that offer total belief and total enthrallment—even and especially as we might claim that we would never ourselves join.”

Dr. Poulomi Saha is Associate Professor of English and codirector of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. A scholar of Asian American literature, postcolonial studies, and queer and feminist theory, they are the author of An Empire of Touch: Women’s Political Labor and the Fabrication of East Bengal, winner of the Harry Levin Prize for Outstanding First Book in the Field, American Comparative Literature Association.