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Photo: Annette Hornischer

Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology; and Director, Program in Religious Studies, University of California, Berkeley

Bosch Fellow in Public Policy - Class of Spring 2013


Charles Hirschkind is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. His research interests concern religious practice, media technologies, and emergent forms of political community in the urban Middle East and Europe. His book The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (Columbia, 2006), received the Sharon Stephens First Book Award from the American Ethnological Association and an Honorable Mention for the Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion. The book explores how a popular Islamic media form, the cassette sermon, has profoundly transformed the political geography of the Middle East over the last three decades. He is also the co-editor (with David Scott) of Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and his Interlocutors (Stanford, 2005). Other publications include “Cultures of Death: Religion, Media, Bioethics” (Social Text, 2008), “Is There a Secular Body?” (Cultural Anthropology, 2011), and “Experiments in Online Devotion: The Youtube Khutba” (International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2012). Hirschkind has received numerous grants and fellowships from, among others, the Mellon Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Carnegie Foundation.

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