Dawn Perlmutter, Director and founder of the Institute for the Research of Organized & Ritual Violence and SEDGCAT LLC is considered one of the leading experts in the areas of religious terrorism and ritualistic crimes.

She designed and developed the Symbolic Evidence Database of Gangs Cults and Terrorists (SEDGCAT), a predominantly visual database that supports law enforcement professionals in identifying and analyzing emblems, insignia, sacred objects, rituals, ideologies, etc. of hundreds of organizations and sub-cultural groups.

Dr. Perlmutter regularly consults and trains law enforcement agencies throughout the United States on identifying and investigating ritualistic crimes and terrorism perpetrated by extremist groups. She is the author of three books and numerous publications on ritual violence, image worship, desecration and blood rituals in contemporary culture.

As the subject matter expert on ritual murder she has been interviewed for many documentaries, newspapers and newscasts inclusive of The O'Reilly Factor, the Fox News Channel, Geraldo at Large, NBC, CBS, The Learning Channel, the CBC and the BBC. After 9/11 Dr. Perlmutter left her position as a tenured philosophy professor in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education to conduct research full time. She holds a Doctor of Philosophy from New York University and a Masters Degree from The American University, Washington, D.C.

Research Domain:

Dawn Perlmutter’s research entails a philosophical theory of violence based on patterns of culture, image worship and the correlation of violent, aesthetic and religious experience. Doctoral work, conducted at New York University, consisted of the study of the phenomenology of image worship/desecration and its relationship to contemporary art and culture.  Subsequent research entailed the application of ritual and aesthetic theory to current issues such as; violence and the media, the ritual use of blood in contemporary art, body modifications, school yard shootings and ritual homicide. As a result of working with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies on numerous ritualistic crimes Dr. Perlmutter developed a method of criminal investigative analysis based on symbolic evidence found at crime scenes. ‘Symbolic Analysis’ differs from typical criminal profiling in that it is not based on psychological methods but on philosophical methodologies of semiotics, hermeneutics and phenomenology. This symbolic method of analysis became the basis for her primary current project; a Symbolic Evidence Database of Gangs Cults and Terrorists (SEDGCAT), a predominantly visual database that supports the intelligence community in identifying and analyzing emblems, insignia, sacred objects, rituals, ideologies, etc. of hundreds of organizations. Her current research is an application of symbolic analysis to particular issues in the war on terrorism; specifically Mujahideen blood rituals, beheadings, ritual mutilation, and Muslim iconoclasm.

Publications:

BOOKS 

Investigating Religious Terrorism & Ritualistic Crimes, Law Enforcement Investigation Book, CRC Press, January 2004.

Reclaiming the Spiritual in Art, Contemporary Cross-cultural Perspectives, author and co-editor with Debra Koppman, State University of New York Press, Albany, N.Y., Aesthetics & Philosophy of Art Series, textbook in aesthetics, June 1999.

Perlmutter , Dawn (Ph.D.) "Graven Images: Creative Acts of Idolatry-A Hermeneutic Study of the Relevance of Theological Proscription of Image-Making in Judaic Law to Contemporary Jewish Art and Artists" NYU 1993 dissertation abstract Available through UMI Dissertation Services