His research addresses globalization, religion, development, Islam, and the state in Southeast Asia, focusing on Indonesia and Malaysia. His current research examines the globalization of Islamic finance and analyzes efforts to make Kuala Lumpur the 'New York of the Muslim World' by transforming it into the central node in a transnational Islamic financial system. His book Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalization, and the Afterlife of Development (2010), was awarded a Sharon Stephens Prize from the American Ethnological Society. His research has been supported by the American Council for Learned Societies, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and other scholarly foundations.