Faculty Members

Faculty who participate in the Forum are drawn from across Emory’s academic community, especially the Graduate Division of Religion, the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Religion. Emory has particularly strong ethnographic resources in  West and South Asian Religions, Africana Religious Cultures, Jewish Religious Cultures, Islamic Civilizations, and American Religious Cultures.

Don Seeman - Co-Convener: Existential and phenomenological anthropology; medical and psychological anthropology, ethnography of Jews and Judaism; Ritual Theory; human experience and suffering.



Devaka Premawardhana- Co-Convener: global Christianity; indigenous religions; African studies; lived religion; humanistic anthropology.

Joyce Flueckiger - Performance studies and anthropology of religion, with a particular interest in gender.

Michael Peletz - Social and cultural theory, gender and sexual diversity, discipline and disorder, and the cultural politics of religion - especially Islam - and modernity, particularly in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim.

Chikako Ozawa-de Silva - Cross-cultural understandings of health and illness, especially mental illness, medical anthropology and perspectives on the mind-body, religion, medicine, therapy, and health and illness.

Jim Hoesterey - Islamic self-help in contemporary Indonesia.

Dianne M. Stewart - African and African Atlantic/diaspora religious cultures.

Faculty with Strong Secondary Interests in Ethnographic Research

Gary Laderman - The sacred in American life, death and funerals, and religious cultures of medicine.

Vincent Cornell - Islamic thought from the doctrinal and social history of Sufism to theology and political philosophy.

Elizabeth Bounds - Peace-building and conflict transformation, restorative justice and the prison system, democratic practices and civil society, feminist and liberation ethics, and transformative pedagogical practices.

Ted Smith - Intersections of practical and political theology, with special attention to the forms preaching and worship take in modern societies.