Bill Maurer

Bill Maurer is a legal and economic anthropologist. He currently serves as the Dean of the School of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He has conducted research on money, finance, economy, and law, including the off-shore financial services industry in the Caribbean, alternative currencies, Islamic finance, mobile money, and traditional and emerging payment technologies, including like Bitcoin. He has been called the “doyen” of the subfield of the anthropology of finance. Maurer is also the founding director of the Institute for Money Technology and Financial Inclusion, a research institute at UC Irvine funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He was previously the founding co-director of the Intel Science and Technology Center in Social Computing, also at UCI.

Maurer received his BA from Vassar College and, in 1994, his PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University. He joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine in 1996. He was Chair of the Department of Anthropology at UC Irvine from 2005-06 until 2010-11 and was Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences from 2011-13. He was appointed Dean of the School of Social Sciences in July 2013. From 2007-09, Maurer was President of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology.

Maurer is currently Associate Editor of the Journal of Cultural Economy and serves as a member of the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Islamic Accounting and Business Research, Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Critique, and PoLAR: The Political and Legal Anthropology Review. In 2015, he was appointed to the Board on Behavioral, Cognitive and Sensory Sciences of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the recipient of four major National Science Foundation research grants on topics ranging from the cultures of international finance to mobile money and private digital currencies.

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