Sarah Muir

Assistant Professor and Deputy Chair, Department of Anthropology, Gender Studies, and International Studies, City College, CUNY
Affiliated Faculty, Linguistic Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center

Sarah Muir (Ph.D., University of Chicago 2011) is Assistant Professor at The City of University of New York. At The City College of New York, she teaches in the Department of Anthropology, Gender Studies, and International Studies and directs the International Studies Program. She also teaches linguistic anthropology in the Anthropology Program at The Graduate Center. Her research is situated at the intersection of linguistic, political-economic, and historical anthropology and examines the practical logics of economic investment, ethical evaluation, and political critique. Her first book, Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Disillusion (University of Chicago Press, 2021), traces the lived consequences of Argentina's history of repeated financial crises. She is currently researching a new book project, Accounting for Kith and Kin: Financial Ethics and the Space-Time of Obligation, which interrogates the social life of economic numbers in Argentina. Her work has appeared in journals such as Annual Review of Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Current Anthropology, Dialogues in Human Geography, City and Society, Journal of Cultural Economy, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Review of the Italian Academic Association of Cultural Anthropologists. Formerly a Distinguished Scholar at the Advanced Research Collaborative (CUNY Graduate Center) and the Co-Director of the Unpayable Debt Working Group (Center for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia University), she has also helped curate and author works of public scholarship such as the "Global Debt Syllabus" and the "Caribbean Debt Syllabus."

Working Group Affiliation

Unpayable Debt: Capital, Violence, and the New Global Economy, Project Director