Don SeemanAssociate Professor, Department of Religion and Tam Institute for Jewish Studies

Don Seeman is an anthropologist (Ph.D. Harvard 1997) who holds a joint appointment in Religion and in the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies. All of his scholarship from his ethnography of Ethiopian-Israelis to his textual studies of Maimonides and of Hasidism during the Holocaust is motivated by the attempt to understand and describe the existential contexts and meaning of religious experience in all its forms. Don is the founding co-chair of the Emory Forum for the Ethnographic Study of Religion. He co-edits the Contemporary Anthropology of Religion book series at Palgrave-Macmillan, and serves on the editorial boards of both Prooftexts and the new open-access Journal of Contemplative Studies. He promotes a truly interdisciplinary approach to the ethnographic and textual study of religion.

Education

• PhD, Harvard University, 1997
• AB, Harvard College, 1991

Research and Teaching

• Phenomenological anthropology
• Anthropology of religion
• Modern and Medieval Jewish Thought and Mysticism
• Hasidism
• Ethiopian Jews
• Contemplative studies
• Contemporary Israel