Dr. Angie Heo, 2012-2015

Angie Heo is now Assistant Professor of the Anthropology and Sociology of Religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

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Angie Heo is an anthropologist focusing on public and political cultures of religion, media, and economy. Her geographic areas of research include the Arab Middle East and the African Mediterranean, Northeast Asia and the Asian Pacific Rim. She is interested in the study of comparative and global Christianities in the modern world, with a particular focus on Eastern Orthodox and Evangelical Protestant traditions.

Angie's first book (under review) examines holy images in Egypt to approach the social, religious and political dynamics of Coptic Orthodoxy in Egypt.  Grounded in thirty months of fieldwork carried out over a momentous decade (2004-2014), her ethnography scrutinizes the visual technological mediation of church-state power and Christian-Muslim difference on an everyday basis.  Ultimately, her study tracks the materialities of imaginary practice to analyze the making of religion in public theatres of revolution, national-sectarianism and communal authoritarianism. 

Angie's second book project shifts gears to Evangelical South Korea to consider the confluence of late capitalist development and anti-communist ideology in Cold War Asia.  Of special interest are the transnational linkages between religious enterprise and political conservatism.  Angie is also nourishing broader interests in American and German Protestant mission history abroad, the emergence of 'third world' theologies and the role of religion in post-1965 U.S. immigrant communities.

Angie moved to MPI after enjoying a Visiting Assistant teaching term at Barnard College in New York City (2008-2011) and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Emory University's Center for Humanistic Inquiry in Atlanta (2011-2012).  Starting July 2015, she returned stateside to teach in the Anthropology and Sociology of Religions area of study at The University of Chicago Divinity School.     

B.A. Harvard University, Anthropology
PhD. University of California at Berkeley, Anthropology