Professor Ebersole is a historian of religions, specializing in Japanese religions and the comparative-historical study of religion. His current research interests include religion and emotion, religion and the body and religion as it relates to issues of space and time.
He is the author of Ritual Poetry and the Politics of Death in Early Japan (Princeton University Press) and Captured by Texts: Puritan to Postmodern Images of Indian Captivity (University Press of Virginia). He is currently completing a book-length study entitled Telling Tears: Toward a Comparative and Historical Study of Ritualized Weeping.