Tímea Gréta Biró

Timea Greta Biro holds a B.A. degree in Sociology & Anthropology from Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca (2007), and an MSc degree in Anthropology of International Development and Humanitarian Assistance from Brunel University, London (2016). After completing her B.A. Greta worked on community development projects in Eastern Europe. In 2011 she relocated to the UK, where she worked as a special needs childhood educator, and also volunteered as a museum educator at the University of Oxford Museums. In 2017, shortly after completing her MA studies, she joined the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle as a doctoral candidate as part of the DFG Emmy Noether research-group. Since January 2020 Greta is a doctoral candidate at FAU.

Anthropology of religion (Islam in particular), anthropology of the state, anthropology of humanitarianism, development studies, gender and sexuality, transgender studies, forced rehabilitation, forced migration, anthropology of the self.
 
Research Area(s)
Southeast Asia (Malaysia), Europe (Hungary and Transylvania).

Publications
Article in an online, not peer-reviewed, journal:
2019 “Reflections from the Field: On a Quest to Save the Poor, a Day in a “Zakat-camp””, BERITA, Summer 2019, Association for Asian Studies, MSB Group. http://www.msbstudies.org/berita.html

Encyclopedia entry:
2019 (accepted, in print) “Malaysia“. Encyclopedia of Islam (EI), Third Edition (ed. Gudrun Kramer, Nico Kaptein et al.), Leiden: Brill (4.000 words), co-authored with D. Müller under his lead.

 

Selected presentations

25.11.2019
“Bringing Trans-women back to Fitrah: Social Engineering through Religious Education and the use of Islamic Alms in Malaysia”. 2019 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, San Diego, USA.

13.09.2019
“Trans-women at the crossroad: The politics of othering and the use of democratizing spaces in Malaysia” (prelim. title). Conference of the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies (EuroSEAS), Humboldt-Universität, Berlin.

04.04.2019
“Sinners, converts, misfits” and the ustad: An Ethnography of an “Islamic Rehabilitation” Project in Malaysia” (prelim. title) (in workshop “Bureaucratizing Diversity in Muslim Southeast Asia”), Islamic Legal Studies Program: Law and Social Change (ILSP: LSC), Harvard Law School, Harvard University, USA.

13.09.2018
“Bringing Trans-women back to Fitrah: Social Engineering through Religious Education and the use of Islamic Alms in Malaysia”. Fieldwork Break Workshop (Emmy Noether Project), Centre for Asian Legal Studies, National University of Singapore.

04.06.2018
“The Bureaucratization of Zakat: An Ethnography of the Culture of Giving in Malaysia” Fieldwork-break presentation of first findings of the ongoing research. Workshop “Social Categorization and Religiously Framed State-Making in Southeast Asia”, St Antony’s College, Asian Studies Centre, University of Oxford, UK.

07.09.2017
“The Bureaucratization of Zakat: An Ethnography of the Culture of Giving in Malaysia” presentation at the workshop “Conceptualizing the Bureaucratization of Islam and its Socio-Legal Dimensions in Southeast Asia: Anthropological and Trans-disciplinary Perspectives” organized by the Emmy Noether Research Group “The Bureaucratization of Islam and its Socio-Legal Dimensions in Southeast Asia”, Halle (Saale), Germany.