Nancy J. Smith-Hefner

Nancy J. Smith-Hefner is a Professor and Department Chair of Anthropology at Boston University, on leave during 2024-25. She specializes in linguistic anthropology, focusing on religion, gender, and youth culture in Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia and Cambodia. Her research explores intersections of language, identity, and morality among Muslim youth, addressing topics like gender diversity, middle-class subjectivities, and cultural debates.

Education: PhD, MA, and BA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Key research areas include: linguistic anthropology, gender/sexuality studies, youth culture, Islam in Southeast Asia, and diasporic communities. She has authored Islamizing Intimacies (2019) and Khmer American (1999), edited Waithood (2020), and her work is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Spencer Foundation, and the Fulbright Program.

Current projects include a monograph on youth romance in Indonesia, analyzing 'experience-near' narratives of young Javanese individuals. Courses taught span sex/gender studies, Southeast Asian modernity, linguistic anthropology, and global sexualities.