Bill Maurer

Bill Maurer is a cultural anthropologist who conducts research on law, property, money and finance, focusing on the technological infrastructures and social relations of exchange and payment. He has particular expertise in emerging, alternative and experimental forms of money and finance, and their legal implications, ranging from offshore financial services to mobile phone-enabled money transfers, Islamic finance, and alternative currencies. His research has been supported by several grants from the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and other sources. He is the editor of six collections, as well as the author of Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands (1997), Pious Property: Islamic Mortgages in the United States (2006), and Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason (2005). The latter received the Victor Turner Prize in 2005. He has worked as a consultant in industry and the non-profit and philanthropic sector, and has also provided expert testimony on his areas of expertise. For more information on Professor Maurer’s current research projects, click on the Research link above.

He serves as a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Islamic Accounting and Business Research, as well as the editorial boards of Cultural Anthropology, the Journal of Cultural Economy, Cultural Critique, and PoLAR: The Political and Legal Anthropology Review. From 2007-09 he was President of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, and served in 2009-10 as a member of the Program Committee for the Law and Society Association meetings in Chicago, IL. He was Chair of the Department of Anthropology at UC Irvine from 2005-06 until 2010-11, during which time the Department hired several new faculty members, expanded its graduate program, and solidified its standing among the very top cultural anthropology programs in the country. In July 2011, he  assumed the role of Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the School of Social Sciences at UC Irvine.