Rebecca Seligman

Assistant Professor (PhD Emory 2004)

1810 Hinman Avenue, Room #204

847-491-7207

r-seligman@northwestern.edu

RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTERESTS: Medical and Psychological Anthropology; Cultural influences on mental health and healing; Self and narrative; Embodiment, psychophysiology, and mind-body interaction; Psychophysiology and cultural neuroscience; Latin America; Immigrant and refugee mental health; Ritual

Rebecca Seligman is a medical and psychological anthropologist who focuses on transcultural psychiatry, or the study of mental health in cross-cultural perspective. Before joining the faculty at Northwestern, Seligman completed a Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR) funded postdoctoral fellowship in the department of Psychiatry at McGill University. Her past research has explored the connection between mental health and religious participation in Northeastern Brazil. This research examined the ways in which a particular religious belief system shapes the meanings of individual psychosocial stress and psychological distress, and showed that intense religious participation functions therapeutically for vulnerable individuals by facilitating a process of self-transformation. Her current research involves an analysis of the links between diabetes and depressed affect among Mexican Americans. This research examines the dialectical relationship between Mexican American ethno-etiologies concerning negative emotion and diabetes onset, and vulnerability to co-morbid diabetes and depression. Seligman’s other research interests include critical examination of the relationships among trauma, PTSD, and dissociation and current neurobiological research concerning these phenomena. In addition, she is in the process of developing a new project investigating how cultural background, migration history, and “acculturative” processes affect the unusually high rates of PTSD found among Latino immigrants in the U.S. Seligman’s recent publications include: Dissociative experience and cultural neuroscience: Narrative, metaphor and mechanism co-authored with Laurence Kirmayer and From affliction to affirmation: Narrative transformation and the therapeutics of Candomblé mediumship (Awarded the Charles Hughes Paper prize by the Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture). Her forthcoming publications include The Unmaking and Making of Self: Embodied Suffering and Healing in Brazilian Candomblé. She has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, and her work has appeared in Discover Magazine.

COURSES TAUGHT

Psychological Anthropology

Gender and Global HealthMedical AnthropologyInternational Perspectives on Mental HealthGraduate Seminar in Medical Anthropology

Ritual: Its Nature and Culture

REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS

Under Review	Seligman, R. The Making and unmaking of self: Embodied suffering and healing in Brazilian Candomblé. Submitted to Medical Anthropology.
2007	Seligman, R. and L.J. Kirmayer Dissociative experience and cultural neuroscience: Narrative, metaphor and mechanism. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 32(1): 31-64.
2005	Seligman, R. From affliction to affirmation: Narrative transformation and the therapeutics of Candomblé mediumship. Transcultural Psychiatry 42 (2): 272-294.
2005	Seligman, R. Distress, dissociation, and embodied experience: Reconsidering the pathways to mediumship and mental health. Ethos 33 (1): 71-99.
2002	Rilling, J. and R. Seligman. A Quantitative morphometric comparative analysis of the primate temporal lobe. Journal of Human Evolution 42(5): 505-534.