Birgit Meyer studied religious studies and pedagogy (for disabled children) at Bremen University and cultural anthropology at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). After her PhD defense in 1995 she was affiliated with the Research Center Religion and Society (UvA). Between 2004 and 2011 she was professor of cultural anthropology at VU University Amsterdam; since September 2011 she is professor of religious studies at Utrecht University. Between 2000 and 2006 she directed the NWO Pionier programma Modern Mass Media, Religion and the Imagination of Communities. She has conducted research on and published about colonial missions and local appropriations of Christianity, modernity and conversion, the rise of Pentecostalism in the context of neo-liberal capitalism, popular culture and video-films in Ghana, the relation between religion, media and identity, as well as on material religion and the place and role of religion in global entanglements. Next to her research in Ghana she has a strong interest in larger conceptual issues regarding the diverse manifestations of religion in past and present, and co-existence of people across and with religious, ethnic and cultural differences. Characteristic of her work is the attention paid to the corporeal, material and political-esthetic dimension of religion from an anthropological perspective. Visual culture and religious images play a strong role in her work. She is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW, since 2007) and the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (since 2023). In 2015 she was awarded the Spinoza Prize by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Academy Professor Prize by the KNAW, thanks to which she could set up the research programme Religious Matters in an Entangled World (www.religiousmatters.nl). In april 2023 she received a honorary doctorate from the Universität Zürich, and in August of hat year the Stewart Hoover Mentorship Award from de International Society of Media, Religion and Culture.