Seamon was born on 14 April 1948. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the
State University of New York at Albany in 1970 and from
Clark University with a PhD in geography in 1977.[1] As a post-doctoral research fellow, he attended the University of Lund in Sweden from 1978 to 1980, working with humanistic geographer
Anne Buttimer.[10] Seamon was Visiting assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma from 1980 to 1983. He joined the Department of Architecture at Kansas State University in 1983 first as a Tenure-track assistant professor, and then as an associate professor from 1987 to 1993 when he was promoted to full Professor.[9]
Bibliography
Select books
Seamon, David. Phenomenological perspectives on place, lifeworlds, and lived emplacement. Routledge, 2023.
Seamon, David. Life takes place: Phenomenology, lifeworlds, and place making. Routledge, 2018.
Seamon, David. A Geography of the Lifeworld: Movement, Rest and Encounter (Routledge Revivals). Routledge, 2015.[b]
Buttimer, Anne, and David Seamon, eds. The human experience of space and place (Routledge Revivals). Routledge, 2015.[c]
Seamon, David, and Arthur Zajonc, eds. Goethe's way of science: A phenomenology of nature. State University of New York Press, 1998.
Seamon, David, and Robert Mugerauer, eds. Dwelling, place and environment: Towards a phenomenology of person and world. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer, 1985.
Select journal articles
Seamon, David. Ways of Understanding Wholeness: Place, Christopher Alexander, and Synergistic Relationality, World Futures: Journal of New Paradigm Research, 80, 2 (2024).
doi:
10.1080/02604027.2024.2330288
Seamon, David. Serendipitous Events in Place: The Weave of Bodies and Context via Environmental Unexpectedness and Chance, Intertwining: Weaving Body Context, No. 3 (2021): 120–133. Milan: Mimesis International.
Seamon, David. Christopher Alexander’s Theory of Wholeness as a Tetrad of Creative Activity: The Examples of A New Theory of Urban Design and The Nature of Order, Urban Science 3, (2019): 1–13.
doi:
10.3390/urbansci3020046
Seamon, David. Understanding Place Holistically: Cities, Synergistic Relationality, and Space Syntax, Journal of Space Syntax, 6 (2015), pp. 32–43.
Seamon, David. Situated Cognition and the Phenomenology of Place: Lifeworld, Environmental Embodiment, and Immersion-in-World, Cognitive Processes,16, 1 (2015): 389–92.
doi:
10.1007/s10339-015-0678-9
Seamon, David. Looking at a Photograph—André Kertész's 1928 Meudon: Interpreting Aesthetic Experience Phenomenologically, Academic Quarter [Akademisk Kvarter], 9 (2015): 322–35.
Seamon, David. Lived Bodies, Place, and Phenomenology: Implications for Human Rights and Environmental Justice, Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 4, 2 (2013): 143–66
Seamon, David. “A Jumping, Joyous Urban Jumble”: Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities as a Phenomenology of Urban Place, Journal of Space Syntax, 3 (2013): 139–49.
Seamon, David. Place, Placelessness, Insideness, and Outsideness in John Sayles’ Sunshine State. In Aether: A Journal of Media Geography, 3 (2008): 1–19.
Seamon, David. Goethe’s Way of Science as a Phenomenology of Nature, Janus Head, 8 (2005): 86–101.
Seamon, David. Emotional Experience of the Environment, American Behavioral Scientist, 27 (1984): 757 770.
Seamon, David. The phenomenological contribution to environmental psychology. Journal of environmental psychology 2 (1982): 119–140.
Book chapters
Seamon, David. Phenomenological Research Methods and Urban Design, in Hesam Kamalipour, Patricia Aelbrecht, and Nastaran Peimani (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Urban Design Research Methods, pp. 224–231. London: Routledge, 2024.
Seamon, David. Architecture and Phenomenology, in Duanfang Lu (ed.), Routledge Companion to Contemporary Architectural History, pp. 218–229. London: Routledge, 2024.
Seamon, David and Thomas Larsen. Humanistic Geography, in Douglas Richardson (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology. NY: Wiley, 2021.
Seamon, David. Place Attachment and Phenomenology: The Dynamic Complexity of Place, in Lynne Manzo and Patrick Devine-Wright (eds.), Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Research, 2nd edition, pp. 29–44. London: Routledge, 2021.
Seamon, David. Atmosphere, Place, and Phenomenology: Depictions of London Place Settings in Three Writings by British-African Novelist Doris Lessing, in T. Griffero and M. Tedeschini (eds.), Atmosphere and Aesthetics, pp. 133–146. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Seamon, David. Merleau-Ponty, Lived Body and Place: Toward a Phenomenology of Human Situatedness, a chapter in T. Hünefeldt and A. Schlitte (eds.), Situatedness and Place, pp. 41–66. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2019.
Seamon, David. A Phenomenological and Hermeneutic Reading of Rem Koolhaas's Seattle Central Library, in Ruth Conway Dalton and Christopher Hölscher (eds.), Take One Building: Interdisciplinary Research Perspectives on the Seattle Central Library, pp. 67–94. London: Routledge, 2017.
Seamon, David. Architecture, Place, and Phenomenology: Buildings as Lifeworlds, Atmospheres, and Environmental Wholes, a chapter in Janet Donohoe (ed.), Phenomenology and Place, pp. 247–263. Lanham, MD: Roman and Littlefield, 2017.
Seamon, David. Hermeneutics and Architecture: Buildings-in-Themselves and Interpretive Trustworthiness, in Bruce Janz (ed.), Hermeneutics, Space, and Place, pp. 347–360. NY: Springer, 2017
Seamon, David and Harneet Gill. Qualitative Approaches to Environment-Behavior Research: Understanding Environmental and Place Experiences, Meanings, and Actions, in Robert Gifford (ed.), Research Methods for Environmental Psychology, pp. 115–135. NY: Wiley/Blackwell, 2016.
Seamon, David. Lived Emplacement and the Locality of Being: A Return to Humanistic Geography? In Stuart Aitken and Gill Valentine (eds.), Approaches to Human Geography, 2nd edn., pp. 35–48. London: Sage, 2015.
Seamon, David. Physical and Virtual Environments: Meaning of Place and Space, in B. Schell and M. Scaffa (eds.). Willard & Spackman's Occupational Therapy, 12th Edition, B. Schell & M. Scaffa, pp. 202–14. Philadelphia: Lippincott, Williams & Wilkens, 2014
Seamon, David. Phenomenology and Uncanny Homecoming: Homeworld, Alienworld, and Being-at-Home in Alan Ball's HBO Television Series, Six Feet Under, in Daniel Boscaljon Resisting the Place of Belonging, pp. 155–70. Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2013
Memberships
The Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences (SPHS)[11]
The International Association for Environmental Philosophy (IAEP)