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Education University of Pennsylvania Books Sacred Language, Ordinary People: Dilemmas of Culture and Politics in Egypt, The sociolinguistic market of Cairo Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Social Sciences, US & Canada | ||
Niloofar Haeri (Persian: نیلوفر حائری) is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She received her Ph.D in Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation was on gender and linguistic innovation written under the supervision of William Labov, Gillian Sankoff, and Charles Ferguson.
She is also the Director of the Program in Islamic Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author and co-editor of several books and articles on Egypt and Iran. Her first book, published in 1996 is entitled: The Sociolinguistic Market of Cairo: Gender, Class and Education. Her edited books are: Structuralist Studies in Arabic Linguistics: Charles A. Ferguson Paper (with A. Belnap, 1997); Perspective in Arabic Linguistics (with E. Bannamoun and M. Eid, 1998); Langues, Religion, et Modernité dans l’Espace Musulman (with C. Miller, 2008). Her second book on Egypt is an ethnography of the co-existence of Egyptian Arabic and Classical Arabic. It is also a study of the modernization of Classical Arabic and poses the question: What is a modern language and can a language be both sacred and modern at once (2003).
Her present research is on prayer and poetry in the lives of a group of Iranian women. Haeri was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for this project. She is currently a Marta Sutton Weeks Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center.