Dr. David Abramson, an analyst at the US Department of State in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research and IU Anthropology PhD, will visit to discuss his career and what it takes to be an anthropologist at the State Department. He recently completed a year of sabbatical leave as a Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Public Policy Scholar working on transnational trends in Islamic education and their impact on the future of Islam in Central Asia.
Dr. Abramson received his doctorate in Cultural Anthropology from Indiana University where he specialized in community and conflict in post-Soviet Uzbekistan. Before coming to Washington, Dr. Abramson spent four years as a postdoctoral research fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies and directed the undergraduate Development Studies major. Dr. Abramson has lectured and written on Islamic-secular tensions and the politics and culture of foreign aid in Central Asia, the role of religion in U.S. foreign policy, and the ethnography of foreign policy as constructed at the State Department. His most recent publication is “Sacred Sites, Profane Ideologies: Religious Pilgrimage and the Uzbek State” in the 2007 Indiana University Press volume Everyday Life in Central Asia.
Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies