Rebecca Seligman

Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Faculty Fellow, Institute for Policy Research
Northwestern University
PhD, Department of Anthropology, Emory University, 2004
r-seligman@northwestern.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Additional biographical information

Rebecca Seligman is a medical and psychological anthropologist who focuses on transcultural psychiatry, or the study of mental health in cross-cultural perspective. Her research interests involve critical examination of the social and political-economic forces that affect the experience and distribution of mental and physical illness, with an emphasis on the physical processes and mechanisms through which such forces become embodied. In particular, Seligman is interested in the relationships among traumatic experience and related outcomes, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, somatization, and dissociation. She is also exploring current neurobiological research concerning these phenomena. Her past research has explored the connection between mental health and religious participation in northeastern Brazil.

Before joining Northwestern's faculty, Seligman completed a postdoctoral fellowship, funded by Canadian Institute of Health Research, in McGill University's psychiatry department. Her work has been published in academic journals in the fields of health, psychiatry, and anthropology, and was featured in the magazine Discover. The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health have provided support for her research.

Current Research

Diabetes in Mexican Americans. This project involves an analysis of the links between diabetes and depressed affect among Mexican Americans. She is investigating the dialectical relationship between Mexican American ethno-etiologies concerning negative emotion and diabetes onset, as well as vulnerability to co-morbid diabetes and depression. This study also includes an examination of the psychophysiological pathways through which stressful experience and emotional reactivity might influence vulnerability to metabolic dysregulation. 

PTSD and Latino Immigrants. Seligman is developing a new project to study how cultural background, migration history, and “acculturative” processes affect the unusually high rates of PTSD found among Latino immigrants in the United States.

Selected Publications

Seligman, R., and R. Brown. Theory and method at the intersection of anthropology and cultural neuroscience. Forthcoming in a special issue of the Journal of Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience (invited paper).

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

Seligman, R. 2005. From affliction to affirmation: Narrative transformation and the therapeutics of Candomblé mediumship. Transcultural Psychiatry 42(2): 272-94.