Meet the Scholar: Snapshots of Intellectual Journeys

Niloofar Haeri – Johns Hopkins University

University Website

Over the years, the projects that have attracted Dr. Haeri most have had to do with how subjectivity is mediated through and constructed with the help of language and how language in turn shapes experiences and exchanges in different spheres of daily life, in exchanges with others, and with God as an addressee through ritual and non-ritual acts.

She received her BA and PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book was on language and gender in Cairo and addressed one of the main questions emerging out of sociolinguistics in the 1980s—who are the agents of language change, women or men? She gravitated toward linguistic anthropology after finishing her dissertation.

Dr. Haeri has collaborated with Dr. Catherine Miller, Director of the Institut de recherches et d’etudes sur le monde arabe et musulman (IREMAM) on language and modernity in various parts of the Muslim world such as Turkey, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Morocco, East Africa, and Cameroon, among others. This topic continues to interest her and she hopes to go back to it soon.

She received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Stanford Humanities Center Fellowship in 2015-2016.