Maria Frederika Malmström

Short presentation

Maria Frederika Malmström is an Associate Professor and Senior Researcher specializing in contemporary Egypt, with a longstanding focus on Urban Political Anthropology and the Anthropology of the Senses. Her work engages critically with theories of masculinities, sound, affect, and materiality. Her 2019 University of California Press monograph, The Streets Are Talking to Me, examines the political and sensory dynamics of post-Revolution Cairo.

Keywords

• Materiality
• Affect
• Sound
• Gendered Bodies
• Egypt

Biography

Malmström holds a PhD in Social Anthropology (2009) and qualified as Associate Professor in 2017 at the University of Gothenburg. She has extensive research experience in the MENA region, with particular expertise in affect theory and new materialism. She has published widely and organized international workshops in Alexandria, New York, Rabat, and Lusaka. Her scholarship combines theoretical innovation with sensory and literary methodologies, contributing to debates on violence, ethics, and the limits of anthropological representation.

Since 2010, New York City has served as her primary academic base. She has held teaching and research appointments at Columbia University, New York University, the Bard College Prison Initiative, Manhattan College, and Marymount Manhattan College. She previously served as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts and later as a Visiting Research Scholar in the Departments of Anthropology at both NYU and Columbia, and at the Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center at CUNY.

Malmström has also held research positions at the Nordic Africa Institute (2012–2016) and the Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University, where she worked on major grants funded by SIDA/Sarec, the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and FORMAS. Between 2022 and 2023, she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Aga Khan University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations in London, where she co-organized the workshop Touching Sound: Passion and Global Politics.

Research

Malmström currently leads the Swedish Research Council–funded project The Militarized Sensorium: State-Sponsored Infrastructure and Affective Politics in Egypt and Tunisia, in collaboration with Adjunct Professor Rosa Sansone. Her ongoing project, The Militarized Sensorium, examines how militarization and state-sponsored infrastructures shape affective experience and social life in Egypt and Tunisia. The interdisciplinary research team brings together expertise in anthropology, linguistics, and Middle Eastern studies to develop the concept of the “militarized sensorium,” a framework that analyzes how military presence mediates perception, embodiment, and everyday life in authoritarian contexts. The project integrates macro- and micro-level qualitative data to illuminate how militarized environments influence political subjectivity and societal structures.

Media

https://norient.com/maria-frederika-malmstrom/ghost-city?user=25667