Speaker: Amira Mittermaier, associate professor of religion and Near and Middle Eastern civilizations, University of Toronto

Amira Mittermaier is an associate professor in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. Bringing together textual analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, her work to date has focused on Muslim everyday life in Egypt. Her award-winning book, Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination (University of California Press, 2011) explores Muslim practices of dream interpretation, as they are inflected by Islamic reformism, Western psychology, and mass mediation. Mittermaier’s current book project examines modes of almsgiving and food distribution in different religious spaces in Cairo. This project aims to think through how everyday acts of giving relate to, and disrupt, political calls for social justice in post-Mubarak Egypt.