Birgit Meyer

Birgit Meyer (PhD anthropology, 1995) is Professor of Religious Studies at Utrecht University. She has conducted anthropological and historical research on missions and local appropriations of Christianity, Pentecostalism, popular culture and video-films in Ghana. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, she studies religion from a global and post-secularist perspective, seeking to synthesise grounded fieldwork and theoretical reflection in a broad multidisciplinary setting. Next to her research in Ghana she has a strong interest in larger conceptual issues regarding the diverse to articulations of religion in past and present, and co-existence across and with differences. Characteristic of her work is the attention paid to the corporeal, material and political-esthetic dimension of religion from an anthropological perspective. In 2015 she was awarded the Spinoza Prize by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Academy Professor Prize by the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). This allowed her to set up the research program Religious Matters in an Entangled World.