Daromir Rudnyckyj

Daromir Rudnyckyj is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, where he serves as Director of the Counter Currency Laboratory and Principal Investigator for the Futures of Money project.  He is also the President of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (2021-2023).  His research addresses globalization, money, religion, development, capitalism, finance, and the state.  He conducts fieldwork and archival research in Southeast Asia, North America, and Europe. His current research examines the techno-politics of money, with a focus on experiments in producing monetary forms and public debates over currency reform. Dr. Rudnyckyj’s most recent book, Beyond Debt: Islamic Experiments in Global Finance (University of Chicago Press, 2019), examines efforts to create a transnational financial network independent of debt and  efforts to make Kuala Lumpur the “New York of the Muslim World” by transforming it into the central node in a transnational Islamic financial system.  With Filippo Osella, he co-edited the volume, Religion and the Morality of the Market (Cambridge University Press, 2017).  Dr. Rudnyckyj’s book, Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalization, and the Afterlife of Development (Cornell University Press, 2010), was awarded a Sharon Stephens Prize from the American Ethnological Society. He has published essays in American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Social Text, Anthropological Theory, JRAI, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, the Journal of Asian Studies, and elsewhere. His research has been supported by the American Council for Learned Societies, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and other scholarly foundations. His courses focus on a variety of topics, including globalization, the anthropology of knowledge, liberalism and neoliberalism, finance and money, development, sovereignty and the state, religion, colonialism and post-colonialism, Islam, and Southeast Asia. He welcomes applications from students working on a variety of topics including: (1) globalization and development; (2) contemporary religious practices; (3) money and alternative monetary forms; (4) neoliberalism, financialization, and knowledge economies; (5) techno-politics in Southeast Asia; (6) the anthropology of science, technology, and knowledge. He holds Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and a B.A. in anthropology from the University of Chicago.