Niloofar Haeri

Niloofar Haeri (Stanford Humanities Center class of 2015–16) is Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She is a linguistic anthropologist who has carried out research in Egypt and Iran. She is the author of Sacred Language, Ordinary People: Dilemmas of Culture and Politics in Egypt (2003) and co-editor of Langue, religion et modernité dans l’espace Musulman contemporain (2008). She recently edited a special section of a journal on comparative notions of sincerity in Protestant Christianity, Russian Orthodox, Jewish ultra-Orthodox and Shi’a women in Iran. Her forthcoming book is on the uses of prayer and poetry as grounds for debating what is true Islam. For this project, she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and a Stanford Humanities Center fellowship.