Amira Mittermaier

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.”