Dr. Ana Vinea

Office Hours: T 2-3 In-Person; W 5-6 Zoom
Zoom Link

Professional Biography

Professor Ana Vinea on Language, Illness, Method, and Structural Violence

Research

I am a cultural anthropologist of the Middle East with research and teaching interests in medicine, occult practices, religion, and popular culture. I received my Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Before joining the Department of Asian Studies, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows and taught in the Middle East Studies department at the University of Michigan. My current research, Healing Dilemmas: Islam, Psychiatry, and Affliction in Contemporary Egypt, examines revivalist Islamic therapies as prominent sites of innovation and contestation within changing medical, religious, and media landscapes. It traces the practices and debates around a form of exorcism known as Qur’anic healing and this therapy’s imbrications with biomedicine and psychiatry. I am also developing a new research project that examines opiate addiction in Egypt as a lens into the dynamics of everyday life after the 2011 uprising.

Awards

Michigan Society of Fellows, Postdoctoral fellowship (2016-2018)
National Science Foundation, Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant (2011)
The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Dissertation Fellowship (2011)
CUNY, The Graduate Center, Provost’s Office University Fellowship (2012-2015)
CUNY, The Graduate Center, Presidential Research Fellowship (2007-2013)
CUNY, The Graduate Center, Robert Gilleece Fellowship (2006-2011)
The American University in Cairo, G. Wisner Award for Scholarly Excellence (2006)

Publications

Monograph in progress

Healing Dilemmas: Islam, Psychiatry, and Affliction in Contemporary Egypt.

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles

2019. “<What is Your Evidence?> A Salafi Therapy in Contemporary Egypt.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 39 (3): 500–512.
2018. “An Emergent Affliction in Today’s Egypt: Islamic Healing, the Psy Sciences, and What Lies In-Between,” Medicine Anthropology Theory, 5 (1): 50–77.
2005. “Creating Families across Boundaries: A Case Study of Romanian/Egyptian Mixed Marriages,” Cairo Papers in Social Sciences, 28 (1).