Nancy Smith-Hefner

Dr. Nancy Smith-Hefner is a linguistic anthropologist and specialist of religion and gender in Southeast Asia. Her early research included projects on language, identity, and gender socialization in Java, Indonesia, as well as identity and moral education among Cambodian refugees in the United States. Her current research takes up questions of gender and sexuality among Muslim Javanese youth.

During the 2009–2010 academic year, Dr. Smith-Hefner will be on sabbatical, completing a book manuscript that traces recent trends and controversies in Muslim youth culture in Java. The book examines new practices of language, dress, courtship, and marriage in relation to public cultural debates on masculinities and femininities, and middle-class subjectivities. Rather than a unitary Muslim conformity, the study emphasizes the increasing pluralization of options for contemporary youth—and the contest to which the new gender diversity has given rise.

Dr. Smith-Hefner is the author of Khmer American: Identity and Moral Education in a Diasporic Community (University of California Press, 1999). Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Spencer Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Fulbright Senior Scholar Program.