Dr. Dor Shilton was awarded a Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship to pursue his project titled “Towards an Integrative Theory of Music and Religious Rituals”. The project will entail the integration of concepts and evidence from two interdisciplinary fields, music science and the cognitive science of religion, to formulate and preliminarily test an overarching theory of music and religious rituals. It will include an analysis of an ethnographic dataset documenting 651 religious rituals in a representative global sample of cultures.

Dor completed his PhD at the School of Philosophy, Linguistics, and Science Studies at Tel Aviv University. His doctoral research critically assessed prevalent theories of human self-domestication and adaptationist theories of the evolution of music, and presented an alternative account of human evolution, with a specific focus on the role of music as a unique interactive technology. He is a postdoctoral fellow at the Edelstein Center at the Hebrew University and at the Cohn Institute at Tel Aviv University and is a research affiliate of the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at Oxford University.

Shilton, D., Patel, A. D., Hill, K., von Rueden, C. (2025). Why Collective Music-Making is Sometimes Rare: A Study of Four Indigenous Societies. Evolution and Human Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2025.106695

Shilton, D., Passmore, S., Savage, P. E. (2023). Group singing is globally dominant and associated with social context. Royal Society Open Science, 10(9), 230562 https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.230562

Shilton, D. (2022). Sweet Participation: The Evolution of Music as an Interactive Technology. Music & Science, 5, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1177/20592043221084710