Amira Mittermaier | |
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Occupation | Anthropologist |
Awards |
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Academic background | |
Alma mater | |
Thesis | Dreams that Matter: An Anthropology of the Imagination in Contemporary Egypt (2006) |
Doctoral advisor | Brinkley Messick |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Anthropology |
Institutions |
Amira Mittermaier is a German anthropologist. After getting her PhD at Columbia University,she became a professor at the University of Toronto. A 2014 Member of the Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars,Artists and Scientists and 2021 Guggenheim Fellow,she is the author of Dreams that Matter and Giving to God .
Amira Mittermaier was born to Norbert Mittermaier,a neurologist and psychiatrist,and Raifa Mittermaier,an analytical psychologist and psychotherapist from Egypt,and raised in Bavaria. [1] Originally educated at the University of Tübingen,she obtained her BA equivalent (1997) at the University of Michigan while an exchange student there. [2]
Following her undergraduate degree,Mittermaier moved to the Columbia University Department of Anthropology,where she obtained her MA (1999) and PhD (2006) in sociocultural anthropology;her doctoral dissertation Dreams that Matter:An Anthropology of the Imagination in Contemporary Egypt was supervised by Brinkley Messick. [2] While at Columbia,she worked as an instructor at Parsons School of Design in 2002, [2] and she won the Middle East Studies Association's 2005 Best Graduate Student Paper Prize. [3] After remaining with Columbia for another year as a lecturer and postdoctoral fellow (2006–2007),she moved to the University of Toronto Department for the Study of Religion and Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations in 2007. [2] Originally an assistant professor at that university,she was promoted in 2012 to associate professor. [2]
Mittermaier won the 2011 American Academy of Religion Book Award for Analytical-Descriptive Studies,the 2011 Chicago Folklore Prize,and the 2011 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion for her book Dreams that Matter , [4] [5] [6] which focuses on the anthropology of dreams. [7] In 2014,she was elected to the Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars. [8] In 2015,she served as the guest editor of an issue for academic journal Ethnos,with the theme being "The Afterlife in the Arab Spring"; [9] it was republished as a standalone volume named The Afterlife in the Arab Spring in 2019. [10] In 2019,she later published Giving to God ,which explores zakat in Egypt following the 2011 Egyptian revolution; [11] that book was awarded a honorable mention for the 2019 Victor Turner Prize. [12] In 2021,she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Religion. [13]
Nut,also known by various other transcriptions,is the goddess of the sky,stars,cosmos,mothers,astronomy,and the universe in the ancient Egyptian religion. She was seen as a star-covered nude woman arching over the Earth,or as a cow. She was depicted wearing the water-pot sign (nw) that identifies her.
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Lila Abu-Lughod is an American anthropologist. She is the Joseph L. Buttenweiser Professor of Social Science in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University in New York City. She specializes in ethnographic research in the Arab world,and her seven books cover topics including sentiment and poetry,nationalism and media,gender politics and the politics of memory.
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Smadar Lavie is a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of California Davis,and a Mizrahi anthropologist,author,and activist. She specializes in the anthropology of Egypt,Israel and Palestine,emphasizing issues of race,gender and religion. She received her doctorate in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley (1989).
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Barbara Helen Tedlock was an American cultural anthropologist and oneirologist. She was a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York,Buffalo. Her work explores cross-cultural understanding and communication of dreams,ethnomedicine,and aesthetics and focuses on the indigenous Zuni of the Southwestern United States and the KʼicheʼMaya of Mesoamerica. Through her study and practice of the healing traditions of the KʼicheʼMaya of Guatemala,Tedlock became initiated into shamanism. She was the collaborator and wife of the late anthropologist and poet Dennis Tedlock.
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