Thomas Csordas

Thomas J. Csordas is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropology at UC San Diego, where he holds the Dr. James Y. Chan Presidential Chair in Global Health. He serves as Founding Director of the Global Health Program and Director of the UCSD Global Health Institute. His research interests include medical and psychological anthropology, global mental health, anthropological theory, comparative religion, cultural phenomenology and embodiment, globalization and social change, and language and culture. He has conducted ethnographic research among Charismatic Catholics, Navajo Indians, adolescent psychiatric patients in New Mexico, and Catholic exorcists in the United States and Italy. He is author of The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing (1994); Language, Charisma,and Creativity (1997); Body/Meaning/Healing (2002); Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization (2009); Engaging Evil: A Moral Anthropology (with William C. Olsen, 2019); Troubled in the Land of Enchantment (with Janis H. Jenkins, 2020).