DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTERESTS

Medical and psychological anthropology; culture and mental health; anthropology of psychiatry and psychotherapy; embodiment and somatization; chronic and medically unexplained illness; trauma and dissociation; cultural therapeutics; cultural neuroscience; Brazil; U.S.; Mexican diaspora.

 

BIOGRAPHY

Rebecca Seligman, PhD, is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. She is also affiliated with the Science in Human Culture Program and the Kaplan Humanities Institute at Northwestern.

Dr. Seligman’s work focuses on the interactions between individual level vulnerabilities and social meaning processes that can produce mental and/or bodily distress or promote healing. Seligman is interested in how political-economic conditions, ontologies, models of self and personhood, narrative, and practice shape experiences of health and illness. Dr. Seligman’s research investigates these questions in both biomedical and religious contexts. Her published works focus on religious devotion and therapeutics, healing and self-transformation, selfhood and illness experience, trauma and dissociation in cross-cultural perspective, embodiment and the intersection of mental and physical health, and the treatment of culture within psychiatry and psychotherapy. 

Seligman’s first book, entitled Possessing Spirits and Healing Selves: Embodiment and Transformation in an Afro Brazilian Religion, focused on the connection between mental health and religious devotion in northeastern Brazil. The book traces the way that spirit possession mediums in Brazilian Candomblé experience healing and transformations of embodied subjectivity through their engagement with Afro-Brazilian religious knowledge,
practices, and meanings.

With funding from the William T. Grant Foundation, Dr. Seligman’s second project investigated experiences of Mexican American youth with mental health care seeking in mainstream American psychiatric settings. Seligman explored sociocultural influences on the ways in which youth and their families conceptualize and experience their emotions, relationships, social identities and sense of self—and how such influences affect their help seeking and experiences with care. The study also investigated how cultural and social differences are addressed by clinicians within biomedical health care systems. Seligman has published several peer reviewed articles on this research in leading medical and psychological anthropology journals.

Seligman’s book in preparation, Conditions of Meaning: An Ethnography of Mind-body Illness, is an examination of what is commonly known as psychosomatic or medically unexplained illness. Drawing on findings from a 2-year NSF funded study of the illness currently labeled Functional Neurological Disorder (FND), formerly Conversion Disorder, the book explores the intersections of personal and social meanings with systemic processes in shaping how people listen to and understand their own bodily sensations and functions. In addition, Seligman investigates the gendered social processes through which women come to disproportionately suffer from delegitimized illnesses, from
Hysteria to Migraine, and the moral, affective, and embodied causes and consequences of such illnesses.

 

BOOKS

Under Contract. Conditions of Meaning: An Ethnography of Mind-body Illness. University of California Press.

2015. Handbook of Cultural Neuroscience. (Co-edited with J. Chiao, R. Turner, and S.
Li). Oxford University Press.

2014. Possessing Spirits and Healing Selves: Embodiment and Transformation in an Afro-Brazilian Religion. Palgrave MacMillan.

 

SELECT PEER REVIEWED JOURNAL ARTICLES

2025 Seligman, R. and M. Canna.** Biological Systems and the Embodiment of Culture. Chapter in Cambridge Handbook of Psychological Anthropology. Edward Lowe, Editor.

2024 Seligman, R. Mothering and Mental Health Care: Moral Sense-Making Among Mexican-American Mothers of Adolescents in Treatment. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 48:614-633.

2023 Seligman, R. Emotion Regulation Across Disciplines: Anthropology. Handbook of Emotion Regulation (3e). James Gross and Brett Ford, Editors.

2022 Seligman, R. Metaphor and the politics and poetics of youth distress in an evidence-based psychotherapy. Transcultural Psychiatry,13634615211066692.

2020 Canna, M.**, and Seligman, R. Dealing with the Unknown: Functional Neurological Disorders and the Conversion of Cultural Meaning. Social Science and Medicine 246: 112725.

2018 Seligman, R. Mind, Body, Brain and the Conditions of Meaning. Ethos 46(3): 397-417.

2018 Seligman, R. “Bio-looping” and the psychophysiological in religious belief and practice: Mechanisms of embodiment in Candomblé trance and possession. In Handbook of Society and Biology. Palgrave MacMillan.

2015 Seligman R., Suparna Choudhury, and Laurence J. Kirmayer Locating Culture in the Brain and in the World: From Social Categories to an Ecology of Mind. Invited Chapter for Oxford Handbook of Cultural Neuroscience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2014 Seligman, R., **E. Mendenhall, M. **Valdovinos, A. Fernandez, and E. Jacobs Subjectivity and self-care among Mexican Americans with Diabetes. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 29(1):61-79.

2010 Seligman, R. The unmaking and making of self: Embodied suffering and mind-body healing in Brazilian Candomblé. Ethos 38(3):297-320.

2010 **Mendenhall, E., R. Seligman, A. Fernandez and L. Jacobs. Speaking through diabetes: Rethinking the uses of “trauma” in Mexican-American diabetes narratives.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 24(2):220-239. 2009 Seligman, R. and R. Brown Theory and Method at the Intersection of Anthropology and Cultural Neuroscience. Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience.

2008 Seligman, R. and L. Kirmayer. Dissociative experience and cultural neuroscience: Narrative, metaphor, and mechanism. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 32(1):31-64.

2005 Seligman, R. Distress, dissociation, and embodied experience: Reconsidering the pathways to mediumship and mental health. Ethos 33(1):71-99.

2005 Seligman, R. From affliction to affirmation: Narrative transformation and the therapeutics of Candomblé mediumship. Transcultural Psychiatry 42(2):272-294.

**Co-authored with a student or mentee

 

FELLOWSHIPS, GRANTS, AND AWARDS

2009-present Institute for Policy Research Faculty Fellowship, Northwestern University.

2024-25 Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship.

2023 National Science Foundation Supplemental Grant. $20,000.

2022 Buffett Institute Global Catalyst Grant “Remaking Media and Mental Health Across Cultures.” R. Seligman, Peter Locke, David Tolchinsky co-PIs. $60,000.

2021 Buffett Institute Global Catalyst Grant “Media Representation of Mental
Health/Illness.” R. Seligman, Peter Locke, David Tolchinsky co-PIs. $60,000.

2021 National Science Foundation Senior Scholars Grant. “From Sensations to
Symptoms: The Social Shaping of Functional Illness Experience.” $216,629.

2020-2021 Northwestern University Associated Student Government Faculty and Administration Honor Roll, Teaching Award

2018-2019 Northwestern University Associated Student Government Faculty and Administration Honor Roll, Teaching Award

2017 WT Grant Foundation Research Grant: “Cultures of Care: Exploring Inequalities in Mental Health Services Among Mexican American Youth.” $102,321.

2016 Northwestern Buffet Center Big Ideas Grant: Medical Cultures and Law. (Co-PI).

2013-2014 Northwestern University Associated Student Government Faculty and Administration Honor Roll, Teaching Award

2014 Northwestern Institute for Policy Research Small Grant: “Making Sense of Mental Health Care: Interpretive, Cultural, and Psychosocial Dimensions of Mexican American Adolescent Experiences with Psychiatry.”

2003 Charles Hughes Fellowship for best paper, awarded by the Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture: “From Affliction to Affirmation: Narrative Transformation and the Therapeutics of Candomblé Mediumship.”

2000-2003 National Institutes of Health, National Research Service Award Fellowship, National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine: “Psychobiology and Mental Health in a Spirit Possession Religion.”

2000 National Science Foundation, Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, Programs in Cultural and Physical Anthropology: “A Call to Mediumship: Social, Psychological, and Psychobiological Predispositions Among Mediums in a Brazilian Spirit Possession Religion.”

 

PROFESSION AFFILIATIONS

Ethos Editorial Board Member (Former Book Reviews Editor)

American Anthropological Association

Society for Psychological Anthropology (Former Board Member)

Society for Medical Anthropology

Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture

Functional Neurological Disorder Society