About

Amira Mittermaier

Professor, Department of Anthropology and Department of Religion, University of Toronto

Fellow, Society of Fellows, SOF/Heyman, Columbia University (2006–2007)

Amira Mittermaier is an Associate Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations. She received her PhD in socio-cultural anthropology from Columbia University. Bringing together textual analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, her research to date has focused on modern Islam in Egypt. Her first book, Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination explores Muslim practices of dream interpretation, as they are inflected by Islamic reformism, Western psychology, and mass mediation. Besides offering insight into a highly central yet simultaneously marginalized religious practice, the book offers theoretical and methodological contributions to an emerging anthropology of the imagination. Professor Mittermaier’s current book project, tentatively titled The Ethics of Giving: Islamic Charity in Contemporary Egypt, examines both direct and institutionalized modes of alms-giving in post-revolutionary Egypt. Professor Mittermaier provides opportunities for student supervision in areas such as modern and postcolonial Islam, Sufism, anthropological approaches to religion, and ethnographic method and writing.