About

Smoki Musaraj is a cultural anthropologist specializing in economic and legal anthropology. Her research focusses on theories of money and value; speculative bubbles; anthropology of corruption and the rule of law; migration and remittances; postsocialist transformations; and societies of the Mediterranean.

Musaraj grew up in Albania and moved to Canada when she was 16 on a fellowship to attend Lester B. Pearson College of the Pacific of the United World Colleges. She received a bilingual International Baccalaureate degree (English and French). After two years on Vancouver Island, she moved to Peterborough, Ontario to pursue her undergraduate studies at Trent University. She received a BA in Cultural Studies and Political Studies in 2001. She then moved to New York City where she lived for 12 years and completed an MA in Political Science and a PhD in Anthropology at the New School for Social Research. Her dissertation fieldwork was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (Canada). After defending her dissertation, Musaraj served as Postdoctoral Scholar at the Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion at the University of California, Irvine (2012-2014). She joined OU in 2014.

Musaraj is author of the book Tales from Albarado: Ponzi Logics of Accumulation in Postsocialist Albania (Cornell 2020), which received the Stavro Skëndi Award for Best Book in Albanian Studies. She is also co-editor of Remitting, Building, and Restoring Contemporary Albania (Palgrave Macmillan 2021) and Money at the Margins: Global Perspectives on Technology, Inclusion and Design (Berghahn Books 2018). She has published in several journals, including American Anthropologist, Cultural Anthropology, and Current Anthropology. 

Musaraj is book review co-editor for POLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review and was recently Germaine Tillion Chair of Mediterranean Tomorrow at the IMéRA Institute of Advance Studies at Aix-Marseille University, France.