Professorial Research Fellow (2019–2024)
University of Aberdeen

Robert A. Segal (1948–2024) was Professor and Sixth Century Chair in Religious Studies at the University of Aberdeen, U.K. From March 2019 to January 2024, he was a Professorial Research Fellow at the Department of Religious Studies, University of Vienna. Previously (1999–2006) he was Professor of Theories of Religion at Lancaster University, where he taught for twelve years. He holds a B.A. in Religious Studies (Wesleyan University, 1970) as well as an M.A. (1974) and a Ph.D. (1983) in Religion (both from Princeton University). Before coming to the U.K. in 1994, he taught at Reed College, the University of Toronto, Stanford University, the University of Pittsburgh, Louisiana State University, and Tulane University. He has received grants from the American Philosophical Society, the British Academy, the Carnegie Trust, as well as the prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. He is the author of The Poimandres as Myth: Scholarly Theory and Gnostic Meaning (De Gruyter, 1986), Religion and the Social Sciences: Essays on the Confrontation (Scholars Press, 1989), Joseph Campbell: An Introduction (Garland, 1987), Explaining and Interpreting Religion: Essays on the Issue (Peter Lang, 1992), Theorizing about Myth (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), Myth: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2004; 2nd ed. 2015), and Myth Analyzed (Routledge, 2021). He is also the editor of more than fifteen works, including The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion (Blackwell, 2006; 2nd ed. 2021, co-edited with Nickolas P. Roubekas) and the three-volume Vocabulary for the Study of Religion (co-edited with Kocku von Stuckrad; Brill, 2015).