Research Areas

Medical and psychological anthropology, mental health and psychic life, critical phenomenology, disaster, biopolitics, psychedelic medicine, United States and South Asia, especially Nepal Himalayas.

Aidan Seale-Feldman is an Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. Her work is concerned with affliction and its treatments—psychiatric, therapeutic, spiritual, and anthropological. She has spent the past decade conducting ethnographic research on disaster, mental health, and psychosomatic disorders in the Nepal Himalayas, a region that has recently witnessed the rapid growth of psychiatry, counseling, and mental health governance. Set in the time of the 2015 earthquakes, her first book project, The Work of Disaster, moves between Kathmandu NGO offices, steep mountain trails, psychosocial interventions, and earthquake- affected villages as it tells the story of an emergent “mental health crisis” and the forms of care that followed in disaster’s wake. Funded by the John Templeton Foundation, Dr. Seale-Feldman’s current research, Ethical Substance: Psychedelic Medicine in Times of Social and Spiritual Crisis, explores the incorporation of mystical experience into the lives of secular Americans and their therapeutic practices. Her work has been published in Cultural Anthropology, Ethos, HIMALAYA: The Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, and the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal. Dr. Seale-Feldman received her PhD in Anthropology from UCLA in 2018. Prior to joining the faculty at Notre Dame, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer in Bioethics at the University of Virginia.