Eric Silverman: podcast appearances and interviews

Eric Kline Silverman is currently the Vice President of technical services at Voluntary Disruption. He is an American cultural anthropologist with a background that includes being a tenured full professor and research professor of anthropology at Wheelock College in Boston until its dissolution in 2018. Silverman has also been a long-standing scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University and a research scholar and writer with The Rhodes Project, a UK-based research initiative studying the lives and careers of female Rhodes Scholars.

Silverman's academic work employs a binocular approach that navigates between American society and cultures worldwide. His research interests include ethnic identity, aesthetics, gender, religion, masculinity, fatherhood, and globalization. He has engaged in anthropological fieldwork since the late 1980s among the Iatmul people of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea and maintains an interest in American Jews and Judaism. His other areas of interest encompass consumerism, childhood, clothing and identity, food, tourism, death and funerary rites, myth and folklore, pop culture, and material culture of everyday life.

As a writer, Silverman has published numerous articles and essays and has delivered many conference presentations. His authored books include Masculinity, Motherhood and Mockery; From Abraham to America: A History of Jewish Circumcision; A Cultural History of Jewish Dress; and Mortuary Dialogues, which he co-edited. Currently, he is working on a fifth book titled From Totems to Tourists: Sepik River Art in a Postmodern World. He also researches contemporary American Jewish fathering, Facebook use in Papua New Guinea, and the Grateful Dead. In addition to his academic pursuits, Silverman has served on the Framingham School Board and contributes editorial columns to Boston-area media outlets.