Amira Mittermaier

Amira Mittermaier is Professor of Anthropology and the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. She received her doctoral degree from Columbia University in 2006. For her first book Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination (University of California Press, 2011), Mittermaier won four prestigious awards. She is also the author of Giving to God: Islamic Charity in Revolutionary Times (University of California Press, 2019) and editor of The Afterlife in the Arab Spring (Routledge, 2016). In 2014 she was elected to the inaugural cohort of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada. Currently Mittermaier is working on a book on God-human relations in present-day Egypt. While telling multiple stories about how Egyptian Muslims relate to, think about, grapple with, and live with (or without) God, the book also asks broader questions about the stakes of approaching a figure like God ethnographically.

Photo Credit: Alejandra Gonzalez Jimenez