Sarah Muir is a linguistic, political-economic, and historical anthropologist whose work examines practices of investment and evaluation. Her first book, Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Disillusion, traces the lived consequences of Argentina’s history of repeated financial crises, and her current research interrogates the social life of economic numbers in Argentina. Her work has appeared in journals such as Annual Review of Anthropology, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Cultural Anthropology, Current Anthropology, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Review of the Italian Academic Association of Cultural Anthropologists. At CCNY, she directs the International and Global Studies Program and teaches classes on language and politics, international and global studies, qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, social theory, and contemporary Latin America.
Education
- 2011 Ph.D., Anthropology, University of Chicago
- 2003 M.A., Anthropology, University of Chicago
- 1998 B.A., Anthropology (summa cum laude), Barnard College
Courses
- Language in Cross-Cultural Perspective
- Global Social Theory
- Global Perspective
- Senior Thesis
- Language and Power
- Research Methods in International Studies
- 2021 Routine Crisis: An Ethnography (Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning Series,
University of Chicago Press) - 2022 Disappointment, Annual Review of Anthropology 51: 307-323 (co-authored with Jessica
Greenberg, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) - 2022 Illiberal Economies: Critique and Ambivalence in an Alternative Investment Scheme,
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 28(4): 1211-1233 (co-authored with Tiana Bakić-Hayden, El Colegio de México) - 2020 La corrupción como categoría clave para pensar la clase media argentina, Argentina y sus clases medias: Panoramas de la investigación empírica en ciencias sociales (pp. 143-158), edited by Enrique Garguin and Serio Visacovsky, Buenos Aires: Biblos.
- 2018 Rethinking the Anthropology of Corruption, Current Anthropology 59(S15): S4-S15 (principal author; with Akhil Gupta, University of California, Los Angeles)
- 2017 Recursive (In)Formality: Law and Legitimacy in a Distributed Monetary System,
Anuac: Review of the Italian Academic Association of Cultural Anthropologists 6(2): 77-83. - 2016 On Historical Exhaustion: Argentine Critique in an Era of “Total Corruption,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History 58(1): 128-159. - 2015 Currency of Failure: Money and Middle-Class Critique in Post-Crisis Buenos Aires,
Cultural Anthropology 30(2): 310-335.
