Amira Mittermaier

Professor
Jackman Humanities Building, Room 332, 170 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5R 2M8
416-978-5938

Campus

Fields of Study

Areas of Interest

  • Ethnographic method and writing

Biography

Amira Mittermaier is Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Department of Anthropology. 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. Her more recent book, Giving to God: Islamic Charity in Revolutionary Times, describes a religious ethics of giving in which believers engage with God by way of giving to the poor. Building on these two projects and drawing on additional fieldwork in Egypt, Professor Mittermaier's current research works toward what she calls an "ethnography of God."
 
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.

Education

PhD, Columbia University
MA, Columbia University
BA (equivaelent), University of Michigan/Eberhard-Karls-Universität