About
Bill Maurer is a cultural anthropologist and sociolegal scholar whose work explores the technological infrastructures and social relations of exchange and payment, ranging from cowries to credit cards and cryptocurrencies. His research interests include the broad range of technologies used throughout history and across cultures to determine value and conduct transactions, with particular expertise in alternative, experimental, and cooperative forms of money and finance, payment technologies, and their legal implications. Maurer has published extensively on topics such as offshore financial services, mobile phone-enabled money transfers, Islamic finance, alternative currencies, blockchain/distributed ledger systems, and the future of money. He is the Dean of the School of Social Sciences at UC Irvine, where he also serves as a Professor of Anthropology, Law, and Criminology, Law and Society. Maurer is the Director of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI), which he has led in research across over 40 countries on how new payment technologies impact people's well-being. His work has influenced US and global policies on mobile payment and financial access and has been featured in prominent media outlets. Maurer has authored several books, including 'Recharting the Caribbean,' 'Pious Property,' and 'Mutual Life, Limited,' the latter of which received the Victor Turner Prize. His recent publications, 'How Would You Like to Pay?' and 'Paid,' examine the rapid technological changes in the payments industry and their social implications. He has also edited a comprehensive six-volume 'A Cultural History of Money.' Maurer has served as an editor for multiple academic journals and held leadership roles in professional associations, including serving as President of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology. He has also contributed as a consultant and expert witness in his field, and his research has been supported by notable grants. Maurer holds a BA from Vassar College and an MA and PhD from Stanford University, and he was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2016.
Research topics
- Computer Science
- Computer Security
- History
- Geography
- Business
- Economics
- Law and economics
Selected publications
Crypto, charisma, and Trump's chaos economy
American Ethnologist · 2025-04-15 · 1 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingL Homme · 2025-01-01
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingDans le massif du Haut-Jura, à la frontière franco-suisse, s’est installé à partir des années 2000 un système de « route-frontière », qui transforme l’espace-frontière fait de compétences et d’opportunités partagées en force d’attractivité des entreprises suisses horlogères pour une main-d’œuvre de « frontaliers » formés, résidant et consommant en France. Dans le même temps, la métropole du Grand Genève a fait le choix de domicilier en France les cadres et les employés dont elle a besoin, dans plusieurs communautés d’agglomération s’étendant dans l’Ain et la Haute-Savoie. Qu’est-ce que cette situation a de spécifique par rapport aux zones frontalières à l’intérieur de l’Union européenne ? Que nous apprend-elle sur les ressorts du pouvoir d’achat, au-delà de ses aspects budgétaires ? Pourquoi le terme même de « frontalier », qui suscite des débats et des tensions dans le Haut-Jura, est-il perçu comme discriminant dans le pays de Gex ? Pour répondre à ces questions, les autrices, l’une économiste et l’autre ethnographe, s’intéressent aux voisins sédentaires des frontaliers, qui sont réfractaires à la route-frontière ou qui en sont exclus. Après avoir décrit la dynamique des mobilités transfrontalières à l’échelle européenne et à l’échelle franco-suisse, elles analysent les calculs économiques des habitants, ainsi que la forte dimension morale entourant la décision de traverser la frontière que ce soit pour travailler ou pour consommer. Elles explicitent le fonctionnement des différents marchés qui, en France, subissent le poids de la route-frontière : marché immobilier, marché des biens et services, marché du travail. Enfin, elles ouvrent des pistes de réflexion sur les dynamiques économiques et sociales à l’échelle des territoires et sur la possibilité de leurs retournements.
Jane Guyer’s negative capability
Hau Journal of Ethnographic Theory · 2025-07-30
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingRoundtable: Establishing Veterans Studies as an Academic Discipline
Journal of Veterans Studies · 2025-08-28
articleOpen accessTen individuals who played key roles in formalizing veterans studies at American universities or within professional associations reflect on the field’s origins, key developments, institutional support, social and historical influences, and its evolution over time. Their responses, condensed and edited for clarity, elucidate the invisible, arduous, and complex labor involved in attempting to establish an academic discipline in 21st century America.
Economic Anthropology · 2025-12-29
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingEdward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-11-20
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingJournal of Cultural Economy · 2024-10-28 · 4 citations
articleOpen accessBook review: Crowdfunding and the Democratization of Finance
Thesis Eleven · 2024-11-20
article1st authorCorrespondingA promise is a promise: A love letter from the <scp>ACH</scp> to the world of 2050<sup>†</sup>
Economic Anthropology · 2024-11-18 · 1 citations
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingABSTRACT Experiments in money often recapitulate long‐standing human concerns over finality and fixity, despite money's reference points in political authority, trust, and the memorialization of relationships of credit and debt. From the point of view of the primary set of infrastructures facilitating the movement of money in 2050, those concerns are misplaced. Recounting the history of those infrastructures, this love letter from a future intelligence is addressed to those humans who would reimagine money so that they will recognize the human and technical infrastructures on which it has always depended.
Forum: Lévi-Strauss’s “The Mathematics of Man”
Social Analysis · 2024-03-01 · 1 citations
articleOpen accessIn a recent issue (Vol. 67, No. 2), we published a new translation, by Matthew Carey, of Claude Lévi-Strauss's seminal but often overlooked essay “The Mathematics of Man,” which was originally published in French in 1956. As Susanne Küchler suggested in her introduction to the text, Lévi-Strauss's insistence on seeing mathematics as more than just a means of quantification and statistical analysis should be of enduring inspiration to anthropologists interested in how models and other forms of patterned transformation operate within social and cultural life, as well as in how we attempt as anthropologists to gain an analytical handle on them. In continued collaboration with Küchler, in the present issue we have invited anthropologists whose work speaks to these concerns to comment on the contemporary relevance of Lévi-Strauss's argument, encouraging them to be as explicit about the shortcomings and potential dangers of Lévi-Strauss's call to mathematics as they may be of its enduring insights and promise.
Frequent coauthors
- 72 shared
R Mulcahy
- 52 shared
K. Robinson
- 52 shared
Ronán Conroy
- 32 shared
D. B. O’Keeffe
- 32 shared
G. Gearty
Trinity College Dublin
- 27 shared
Julia Elyachar
- 26 shared
John Comaroff
- 26 shared
Justin B. Richland
Labs
Not provided
Education
- 1994
Ph.D.
Stanford
Awards & honors
- Victor Turner Prize (2005)
- Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sc…
- Resume-aware match score
- Save to shortlist
- AI-drafted outreach
See your match with Bill Maurer
PhdFit ranks faculty by your research interests, methods, and publications — grounded in their actual work, not templates.
- Free to start
- No credit card
- 30-second signup