Bradd Shore, Ph.D.

Bradd Shore is director of Emory's Center on Myth and Ritual in American Life ("MARIAL"), a Sloan Center on Working Families, supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Program on Dual-Career Working Middle Class Families. The Emory center promotes scholarly studies of myth and ritual among working families in the  United States, helps train the next generation of scholars to focus attention on these areas, and aims to use its research insights to foster positive social change. A cultural anthropologist, Shore's research portfolio has made him a leading authority on Samoan culture and the study of Polynesian societies. His theoreitcal orientation also has been interdisciplinary, as he tries to reconcile interpretive approaches of cultural anthropology with findings in other fields such as cognitive psychology, ethics and literature. An award-winning teacher, Shore has been a member of the Emory faculty since 1982. He previously was a member of the faculty at the University of California at Santa Cruz and at Sarah Lawrence College. At Emory he teaches an unusual course co-listed in the English and anthropology departments called "Ritual in Shakespeare." Shore has been a member of the organizing committee for an exhibit based on Margaret Mead's papers (some 800,000 documents) for an exhibit at the Library of Congress, and he has served as president of the Society for Psychological Anthropology. Shore holds an undergraduate degree in English (with an emphasis on Shakespeare) from the University of California at Berkeley, and master's and doctoral degrees in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago. Bradd Shore: Director of MARIAL CenterEnlarge this image