About

Niloofar Haeri is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, with research interests spanning religion, prayer, poetry, ritual, semiotics, presence, gender, voice, vernacularization, and translation, particularly in Iran, Egypt, and the Middle East. She holds a BA and PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania and has transitioned from sociolinguistics to linguistic anthropology. Her work explores how subjectivity is mediated and constructed through language, and how language shapes experiences and exchanges in daily life, including interactions with others and with God through ritual and non-ritual acts. Haeri's notable contributions include her first book on language and gender in Cairo, and her book 'Sacred Language, Ordinary People: Dilemmas of Culture and Politics in Egypt,' which examines the political and cultural dilemmas surrounding the use of Classical Arabic versus Egyptian Arabic. Her research also extends to language and modernity across the Muslim world, including collaborations on projects about language and modernity in Turkey, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Morocco, East Africa, and Cameroon. Between 2008 and 2016, she conducted fieldwork in Tehran with middle-class women, resulting in her book 'Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: Women, Prayer, and Poetry in Iran,' published by Stanford University Press. This work explores the cultural history of prayer and poetry in Iran and their roles in individual and collective identity, especially in the context of revolutionary and religious debates. Haeri has received prestigious fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Stanford Humanities Center Fellowship. Her scholarly output includes articles on Iranian revolutionary art, ritual prayer, language and sincerity, and the role of poetry and prayer in Iranian culture. She is engaged in ongoing projects on voice, presence, and absence, as well as visual productions related to revolutions in Iran and Russia. Her work consistently emphasizes the importance of language, ritual, and cultural practices in shaping social and religious identities, with a focus on how sacred texts and vernacular language influence individual subjectivity and collective memory.

Research topics

• Philosophy
• Art
• Political Science
• Religious studies
• Aesthetics
• Literature
• Sociology
• Gender studies
• Psychology
• Theology
• Linguistics
• Law
• Business

Selected publications

• Legacies of Protest Art in Iran

  Public Culture · 2024-05-01

  article

  Abstract This article examines the art practice of a group of professors and students—who later came to be known as Group 57—at the Fine Arts College of the University of Tehran during the revolutionary period of 1978 to 1980. Through interviews with artists and art historical research, the authors describe the artists’ workshop where they produced posters against the Shah, the United States, and imperialism. Their posters drew on the bold colors, clear text, symbolic imagery, and easy reproducibility of international radical poster art and the early Russian revolutionary avant-garde. The authors recover these aesthetic and intellectual connections in the academic and professional training of the artists and in the art historical context of the posters themselves, examining the posters’ recent and more distant influences, and reinscribing the artists in the history of Iranian art and international art history. The authors also point toward connections between Group 57 and protest art in Iran today.

  PublisherDOI

• Language, Ritual, and Non-Ritual Prayer

  2022-05-03

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter is concerned with the multiple roles that language plays in the experiences of two forms of Islamic prayer: one ritual and obligatory, salat (namaz in Persian)1; and the other spontaneous and voluntary, generally called duʻa . We will address the following questions: What kinds of roles does language play in the ways these prayers are experienced; What does a comparison of salat and duʻa tell us about the believer’s relationship with God; What, if anything, is different when reciters perform salat in Arabic and duʻa a in non-Arabic languages spoken by Muslims around the world?

  PublisherDOI

• The Sociolinguistic Market of Cairo

  2021 · 12 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Linguistics
  • Business
  • Philosophy

  First published in 1997. The field of Arabic sociolinguistics has made rapid strides since the appearance of the first correlation studies in the early 1980s. Up to that point, studies of non-standard Arabic had largely been confined to the field of dialectology, in which the researcher's frame erred on the historical or cultural. Dr. Haeri's work falls into the Labovian sociolinguistic paradigm, with the edition of the awareness of the local social backdrop in her linguistic investigations and how this needs to be integrated into any correlation work, and also being area of the general Arab sociolinguistic frame of reference of which the situation in Cairo forms a part.

  PublisherDOI

• Searching for Explanations: Gender, Class, and Education

  2021-12-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Methodology

  2021-12-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  2021-12-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Re-appearance of a Classical Sound: The Qaf

  2021-12-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Language Attitudes and Ideologies

  2021-12-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Palatalization: A Non-classical Stylistic Resource of Cairene Arabic

  2021-12-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Conclusion

  2021-12-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• R. Kirk Belnap

  Brigham Young University

  11 shared

• Elabbas Benmamoun

  Duke University

  2 shared

• Mushira Eid

  2 shared

• Narges Bajoghli

  Johns Hopkins University

  1 shared

• Alan S. Kaye

  1 shared

• William M. Cotter

  1 shared

• Anne Eakin Moss

  1 shared

• Catherine Miller

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Guggenheim Fellowship (2015-2016)
• Stanford Humanities Center Fellowship (2015-2016)
• Discovery Grant from the Provost’s office for the project “I…