Patricia Spyer’s work focuses on theoretical concerns that she explores and problematizes through ethnographic material collected largely, though by no means exclusively, through field research in Indonesia.

Dr. Spyer’s writings span issues of contemporary religion, modernity, and historical consciousness, such as her work The Memory of Trade: Modernity’s Entanglements on an Eastern Indonesian Island (2000), while the problematics of materiality, mediation, and visuality have been central to her edited volume Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, a number of publications on photography, the co-edited Handbook of Material Culture, and the research program Signs of Crisis that she co-directed with Dr. Mary Steedly of Harvard University. Since 2000, Dr. Spyer has also worked with a number of documentary filmmakers in Indonesia. In 2006, she organized and curated a conference at NYU on “Signs of Crisis: Religious Conflict, Human Rights, and the New Documentary Film in Southern Asia” which brought together documentarians from South and Southeast Asia with human rights activists, lawyers, and scholars. Dr. Spyer is currently completing a book Orphaned Landscapes: Religion, Visuality, and Violence in PostSuharto Indonesia on the mediation of the religiously-inflected conflict in the Moluccas, Indonesia, and a co-edited volume Images Without Borders.

Educated in the Netherlands and the United States, she obtained her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. Dr. Spyer taught as a William Rainey Harper Fellow at the University of Chicago and was a founding member of the Research Centre Religion & Society at the University of Amsterdam. Since 2001, she has held the chair of the Cultural Anthropology of Contemporary Indonesia at Leiden University.