Rula Jurdi Abisaab is a Professor of Islamic History at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University, Montreal. She holds a PhD from Yale University and she teaches in all areas of Islamic Shīʿah history with a special interest in the transformation of juristic thought, the ʿulamāʾ’s legal authority, and relations of power in Shīʿī society in sixteenth and seventeenth century Iran. She is the author of Converting Persia: Religion and Power in Safavid Iran (London, 2004) and The Shi`ites of Lebanon: Modernism, Communism and Hizbullah’s Islamists (New York, 2014), co-authored with Malek Abisaab, and has contributed articles to journals including The Muslim World, the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies. Rula Jurdi Abisaab has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since January 2016.
Saiyad Nizamuddin Ahmad holds a PhD in Islamic Studies from Princeton University. He has held academic positions at the American University in Cairo and the International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilisation in Kuala Lumpur. He is the author of Fatwas of Condemnation: Islam and the Limits of Dissent (Kuala Lumpur: 2006). Dr Saiyad Nizamuddin Ahmad was a full-time employed member of staff as a Research Fellow at the Shīʿah Institute from September 2015 to May 2018. He was also an honorary Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute from June 2018 to October 2023.
Ismail Fajrie Alatas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He received his PhD in Anthropology and History from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and his MA from the National University of Singapore. His most recent publication, Al-Rashafat: Percikan Cinta para Kekasih (Bentang 2013) is an Indonesian translation and commentary on an eighteenth-century Ḥaḍramī Sufi Poem. He has written two other books in Indonesian and his articles have appeared in several academic journals including Comparative Studies in Society and History, Die Welt des Islams, Journal of Islamic Studies, Studia Islamica, Indonesia and the Malay World, and the Encyclopedia of Islam. His current research explores the relationship between post-Prophetic Islamic religious authority and social formation in historical and contemporary Yemen and Indonesia. Ismail Fajrie Alatas has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since September 2016.
Elizabeth R. Alexandrin is an Associate Professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Religion at the University of Manitoba. She holds a PhD in Islamic Studies from McGill University, Montréal, and her research interests focus on mediaeval Islamic thought, Sufism, and Islamic philosophy. She has contributed chapters to books including Dreams and Visions in Islamic Societies (Albany, 2012) and The Prophet’s Ascension: Cross-Cultural Encounters with the Islamic Mi’raj Tales (Bloomington, 2010), as well as articles and reviews to journals including Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, the Journal of Qur’anic Studies, and Iranian Studies. Elizabeth R. Alexandrin has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since January 2016.
Aun Hasan Ali is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He holds a PhD in Islamic Studies from McGill University, Montreal and he specialises Shīʿah intellectual history, covering jurisprudence, with a particular focus on the Iraqi city of Ḥillah during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries AD. He has contributed to journals including the Journal of the Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University, and to books such as Interpretations of Law and Ethics (Edinburgh, 2010) and Encyclopedias About Muslim Civilizations (Edinburgh, 2009). Aun Hasan Ali has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since November 2015.
Ata Anzali is an Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at Middlebury College, Vermont. He holds a PhD from the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University and his research interests focus on the early modern developments of Sufism in Persia, as well as theories and methods in the study of religion, the comparative study of mysticism and religion, the early history of Islam and the Qurʾān, Persian culture and civilisation, and modern religious reform movements in the Middle East. He has co-authored the textbook, Comparing Religions: Coming to Terms (Malden, MA, 2014), and has contributed articles to journals including the Journal of Sufi Studies. Ata Anzali has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since February 2016.
Sussan Babaie is a Professor of the Arts of Iran and Islam at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She holds a PhD in the Arts of Islam from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, she is a renowned authority on the art and visual culture of the Safavid period, and her research interests include concepts of urbanism, empire, and exoticism. She is the author of Shirin Neshat (Detroit, 2013), Isfahan and its Palaces: Statecraft, Shi‘ism and the Architecture of Conviviality in Early Modern Iran (Edinburgh, 2008), and, with Marie Lukens Swietochowski, Persian Drawings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 1989), as well as the co-editor, with Talinn Grigor, of Persian Kingship and Architecture: Strategies of Power in Iran from the Achaemenids to the Pahlavis (London, 2015), for which she wrote the chapter ‘Sacred Sites of Kingship: Spatial-Spiritual Mapping and the Discourse of Empire in Early Modern Safavid Iran’. She has also contributed articles to journals including the Getty Research Journal, the Journal of Early Modern History, and Muqarnas. Sussan Babaie has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since January 2016.
Kathryn Babayan is an Associate Professor of Iranian History and Culture in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan. She holds a PhD on the subject of ‘The Waning of the Qizilbash’ from Princeton University, and her research interests focus on Shīʿah Islam, Sufism, and gender in early-modern Iran. She is the author of Mystics, Monarchs and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran (Cambridge, 2002), and she has contributed chapters to books including Iranian Civilization, from Antiquity to Present (Oxford, 2012), Slaves of the Shah: New Elites of Safavi Iran (London, 2004), and Women in the Medieval Islamic World (London, 1998), as well as articles to journals including Iranian Studies. Kathryn Babayan has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since February 2016.
Roberto Buttignol holds a PhD in the metaphysical traditions of the School of Isfahan from Ca’Foscari University of Venice and his research focuses on the mysteries of the acts of worship and their exegesis. He has taught courses in Islamic studies at Ca’Foscari Venezia. Roberto Buttignol has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since October 2012.
James Caron is a Lecturer in Islamicate South Asia at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He holds a PhD in South Asia Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and his research interests include Pashto literature and the socio-political history of Islamicate South Asia from 1880 to 1960. He has previously lectured at the University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers University, Newark, and received the John F. Richards Fellowship from the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies. He has published articles in journals including the International Journal of Middle East Studies, History Compass, and The Journal of Social History, and has contributed to books including Afghanistan in Ink: Literature Between Diaspora and Nation (London, 2013) and Under the Drones: Modern Lives in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Borderlands (Harvard, 2012). James Caron has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since September 2015.
Peter J. Chelkowski is a Professor Emeritus of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He holds a PhD in Persian Literature from the University of Tehran, and his research interests focus on the mysticism, literature, and performing arts of the Middle East. He is the author of Ta`ziyeh: Ritual and Drama in Iran (New York, 1979), Mirror of the Invisible World (New York, 1975), and, with H. Dabashi, Staging A Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran (London, 1999). He has also contributed articles to journals including Die Welt des Islams, The Drama Review, and Muqarnas. Peter J. Chelkowski has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since January 2016.
Christopher Clohessy is a missionary Catholic Priest and also a Visiting Lecturer at the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies in Rome, where he received his PhD in Arabic–Islamic studies and where he now teaches on Muslim ethics and the history and doctrine of Shīʿah Islam. He is the author of Fatima, Daughter of Muhammad (Piscataway, NJ, 2009), and has contributed chapters to books including Christian Responses to Islam (Manchester, 2008) and Catholics and Shi´a in Dialogue (London, 2004). Christopher Clohessy has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since January 2016.
José Cutillas is a Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies and the Director of the Iranian Studies Seminar at the University of Alicante, where he has been teaching since 1997. He holds a PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Alicante, and his research interests focus on relations between Safavid Persia and the Spanish Monarchy in the early modern period, as well as on the Moriscos of Spain and the Shīʿah Muslims of the Western Mediterranean. He is the author of Crónica y relación de la esclarecida descendencia xarifa (Alicante, 1999) and La vida de Buda: El Kitab Bilawhar va Budasf según la versión persa (Alicante, 2006), as well as one of the editors of The Spanish Monarchy and Safavid Persia in the Early Modern Period: Politics, War and Religion (2016) and, since 2013, a council member of the Consejo Ibero-Safavi de Estudios Históricos. José Cutillas has been a Fellow of Shīʿah Institute since February 2016.
Alireza Doostdar is an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He holds a PhD in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University. His research interests include Shīʿī hagiography, new religious movements, and syntheses between Islam and modern science. He has contributed articles to journals including American Anthropologist, New Inquiry, and Symbols. Alireza Doostdar has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since February 2016.
Arthur Dudney is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He holds a PhD in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies from Columbia University and his research interests focus on Persian and Persianate languages and literature in early-modern South Asia. He is the author of Delhi: Pages from a Forgotten History (New Delhi, 2015), and he has contributed chapters to books including Texts and Traditions in Early Modern North India (Delhi, 2015) and Problematizing Language Studies: Cultural, Theoretical and Applied Perspectives (Delhi, 2010), and articles and reviews to journals including Indian Linguistics and the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. Arthur Dudney has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since January 2016.
Zoheir Ali Esmail holds a PhD from the University of Exeter. Zoheir Ali Esmail was a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute from February 2017 till December 2022.
Ingvild Flaskerud is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oslo. She holds a PhD from the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies, and Religion at the University of Bergen, and her research interests focus on the ethnography of Shīʿah communities in Iran and Northern Europe, including popular ritual, material culture, and religious authority. She is the author of Visualizing Belief and Piety in Iranian Shiism (London, 2010) and she has contributed chapters to books including Unburied Memories: The Politics of Bodies of Sacred Defense Martyrs in Iran (London, 2012), The Art and Material Culture of Iranian Shi‘ism: Iconography and Religious Devotion in Shi‘i Islam (London, 2011), and The Women of Karbala: Ritual Performance and Symbolic Discourses in Modern Shi‘i Islam (Austin, 2005), as well as articles to journals including Anthropology of the Contemporary Middle East and Central Eurasia, Visual Anthropology, and DIN: Religionsvitenskapelig tidsskrift. Ingvild Flaskerud has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since February 2016.
Robert Gleave is a Professor of Arabic Studies at the University of Exeter. He holds a PhD from the University of Manchester and specialises in Shīʿī legal theory. He is the author of books, including Islam and Literalism: Literal Meaning and Interpretation in Islamic Legal Theory (Edinburgh, 2012), Religion and Society in Qajar Iran (London, 2009), and Scripturalist Islam: The History and Doctrines of the Akhbari School of Shii Thought (Leiden, 2007). Robert Gleave has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since February 2015.
Najam Haider is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Barnard College, Columbia University, where he teaches courses in Islamic studies and history. He holds a PhD from Princeton University and his research interests include Islamic law and Shīʿah Islam. He has published articles focusing on Islamic historiography and the emergence of identity in Muslim religious movements, and he is the author of The Origins of the Shīʿa: Identity, Ritual, and Sacred Space in 8th century Kūfa (Cambridge, 2012) and Shīʿī Islam: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2014). He is currently engaged in research on a historiographical survey of early Shīʿah Islam. Najam Haider has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since October 2012.
Idris Hamid is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Colorado State University. He holds a PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo on the metaphysics and cosmology of process according to Shaykh Aḥmad Aḥsāʾī (d. 1826). His research focuses on Islamic cosmology, philosophy, metaphysics, and mysticism, specifically within a Shīʿī context. He has published a number of articles and books, including Islām, Stations, and Process: the Spirituality of Walāyah (New York, 2011), Sign and Creation: the Cosmology of Walāyah (New York, 2011), and, with Mirrakor Abbas, Islam and Development: The Institutional Framework (New York, 2009). Idris Hamid has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since October 2012.
Syed Akbar Hyder is an Associate Professor of Asian Studies and Islamic Studies, director of Urdu Studies, and chair of the Islamic Studies program at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds a PhD from Harvard University and his research specialises in devotion and aesthetics in the Indian Subcontinent and the Middle East. He is a Visiting Fellow at the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Reliving Karbala: Martyrdom in South Asian Memory (Oxford, 2006) and is currently working on a monograph about Josh Malihabadi and twentieth-century composite literary traditions. Syed Akbar Hyder has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since October 2012.
Tariq al-Jamil is an Associate Professor of Religion and Program Coordinator of Islamic Studies at Swarthmore College. He holds a PhD from Princeton University and his publication and research interests include, among other subjects, pre-modern religious identity, mediaeval Islamic social history and law, the transmission of knowledge in Islam, and women in Islamic jurisprudence. He is the author of Power and Knowledge in Medieval Islam: Shīʿī and Sunnī Encounters in Baghdad (London, 2015). Tariq al-Jamil has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since October 2012.
Justin Jones is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford. He holds a PhD in South Asian Studies from the University of Cambridge, and his research interests focus on religious and social transformation within Islam in the Indian subcontinent from the mid-nineteenth century, including concepts of law, domesticity, and migration. He is the author of Shi‘a Islam in Colonial India: Religion, Community and Sectarianism (Cambridge, 2012); he has also contributed chapters to books including Religion and the Household: Studies in Church History (Woodbridge, 2014) and Nationalism in the Vernacular: Hindi, Urdu and the Literature of Indian Freedom (New Delhi, 2010), as well as articles to journals including the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society and Modern Asian Studies. Justin Jones has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since January 2016.
Hadi Jorati is an Assistant Professor of History and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He holds a PhD from Yale University on the subject of ‘Science and Society in Medieval Islam: Nasir al-Din Tusi and the Politics of Patronage’, and his research interests focus on Islamic Iran and Persianate cultures, the sciences in Islamic traditions, and classical Arabic and Persian historiography. He has contributed entries to the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Science, and Technology in Islam, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought, and Encyclopaedia Iranica. Hadi Jorati has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since January 2016.
Abbas Kadhim is a Senior Fellow of the Middle Eastern Programme at the Atlantic Council. Previously, he was a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of John Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. He holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and his research interests focus on politics and Islam in the modern Middle East. He is the author of Reclaiming Iraq: the 1920 Revolution and the Founding of the Modern State (Austin, 2013), The Hawza under Siege: A Study in the Ba’th Party Archive (Boston, 2013), and Iraq, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World (London, 2010). Abbas Kadhim has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since August 2013.
Ayfer Karakaya-Stump is an Associate Professor of History at the College of William & Mary, Virginia. She holds a PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University, and her research interests focus on the social and cultural history of mediaeval and early modern Islamicate societies, particularly in regards to gender, borderlands, and nonconformist religious movements. She is the author of the Turkish work Rethinking Alevi-Bektashi History: Sources and Historiography (Istanbul, 2015), and has contributed articles to journals including Turcica, the International Journal of Turkish Studies, and the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. Ayfer Karakaya-Stump has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since January 2016.
Jari Kaukua is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. He holds a PhD from University of Jyväskylä and his research interests are focused on Avicenna and the post-Avicennian Islamic philosophical tradition, especially regarding questions of epistemology and the philosophy of mind, as well as metaphysics, philosophical theology, and ethics. He is the author of Self-Awareness in Islamic Philosophy: Avicenna and Beyond (Cambridge, 2015) and he has contributed articles to journals including History and Theory, Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale, and Vivarium. Jari Kaukua has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since January 2016.
Dr Syed Ali Kazim is presently working as an Associate Professor at the Centre of Advanced Study, Department of History, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India. He has around twenty years of research and teaching experience at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, and Aligarh Muslim University. Besides being a Research Officer at the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund associated with the compilation, annotation and editing of the multi-volume “Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru” series. His area of research has been the nobility and the growing factionalism in the later Mughal Court, especially during the period of Bahadur Shah I, Jahandar Shah and Farrukhsiyar (1707-1719). He is presently improvising his Ph.D. thesis in order to publish it with the title “The Kingmakers at the Mughal Court: The Rise and Fall of Saiyid Brothers.” His recent interest has focused on the Medieval West and Central Asia with special reference to the many religio-political and mystico-political movements therein. Syed Ali Kazim has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since April 2021.
Mohammad Amir Ahmad Khan holds a PhD in South Asian History from the University of Cambridge. He is currently an Associate Professor and Head of the Department for Political Science and History at Ashoka University in Haryana, India. His interest and research focuses on matters of religious identity, democracy, culture and politics within South Asia and the Middle East. Dr Mohammad Amir Ahmad Khan was a Research Associate at the Shīʿah Institute whilst undertaking his PhD at Cambridge, and from June 2015 he has been a Fellow and the honorary Keeper of the Archives of the Shīʿah Institute.
Hasan Ali Khan is an Assistant Professor in the School of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Habib University, Karachi. He holds a PhD in the Study of Religions from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. His forthcoming book, Constructing Islam on the Indus: The Material History of the Suhrawardi Sufi Order, 1200–1500 AD, is an adaptation of his doctoral thesis. His current research interests are in the Alevi community of Turkey and the Ahl-i Ḥaqq of Iran. He is also involved in research on the Rifāʿi Sufi Order, prevalent amongst the coastal Baluch in Pakistan. Hasan Ali Khan has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since September 2015.
Peter Knapczyk is an Assistant Professor at the Wake Forest University, where he teaches Hindi, Urdu, and South Asian studies. He holds a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, and his doctorate is entitled ‘Crafting the Cosmopolitan Elegy in North India: Poets, Patrons and the Urdu Marsiyah, 1707–1857’. His research interests include Hindi and Urdu literature, Islam in South Asia, music, and religion. His current research examines the religious and socio-political history of Shīʿī devotional literature in South Asia. He is preparing a monograph on the Urdu marsīyah tradition in colonial India. He is the author of the English introduction to Jawn Martyr of Karbala Lamented (London, 2014), published by the Shīʿah Institute Press. Peter Knapczyk has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since December 2014.
Robert Langer is a Professor at Universität der Bundeswehr München. Previously, he was a Privatdozent for Islamic Studies at the University of Heidelberg and a Senior Researcher at the Orient-Institut in Istanbul. He holds an MA in Islamic Studies and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Heidelberg, where he also gained his PhD and Habilitation for ‘Islamwissenschaft’. His research specialisms are in the religious history and ethnography of the Muslim World. Previously he researched the Anatolian Alevis as part of the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Dynamics of Ritual’ at the University of Heidelberg. Besides his dissertations Pīrān und Zeyāratgāh (Leuven et al. 2008) and Alevitische Rituale im transnationalen Kontext (Wiesbaden [forthcoming, 2018]), he has published several articles and edited volumes on Zoroastrianism, Alevism, Yezidism, diaspora Twelver Shiism, and ritual theory. Robert Langer has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since April 2016.
Wilferd Madelung was a Professor Emeritus and former Laudian Professor of Arabic in the Institute of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford. He held a PhD in Islamic History from Universität Hamburg, and he was a world-renowned scholar of Islamic theology and history in its formative period. He is the author of books including The Succession to Muḥammad: A Study of the Early Caliphate (Cambridge, 1997), as well as numerous scholarly articles, selections of which have been published as Studies in Medieval Muslim Thought and History (Aldershot, 2013), Studies in Medieval Shi’ism (Aldershot, 2012), and Religious Schools and Sects in Medieval Islam (London, 1985). Wilferd Madelung was a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute from January 2016 till his death in 2023.
Rebecca Masterton holds a PhD in the Islamic and Francophone literature of West Africa from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She is the author of a fictional work Passing Through the Dream (London, 2008). Rebecca Masterton has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since October 2012.
Louis Medoff holds a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, where his thesis examined ʿAllāmah Ṭabāṭabāʾī’s al-Mizan fi tafsir al-qurʾān. His research specialisation is in Islamic intellectual history with an emphasis on Imāmī Shīʿī thought. He has published articles in The Journal of Shia Islamic Studies, entries in the Encyclopaedia Iranica and The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Science, and Technology in Islam (Oxford, 2014) and is currently working on an intellectual biography of ʿAllāmah Ṭabāṭabāʾī (London, forthcoming). Louis Medoff has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since June 2018.
Matthew Melvin-Koushki is an Assistant Professor of Islamic History at the University of South Carolina. He received his PhD in Islamic Studies from Yale University. Matthew Melvin-Koushki was an honorary Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute from February 2016 to July 2017.
Sergio I. Moya Mena is Coordinator of the Centre for Middle East and North African Studies at the School of International Studies at the National University, Costa Rica. He is also Professor of Political Science at the University of Costa Rica. He received his BSc. in International relations and Theology from the National University and his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Costa Rica. He is the author of The Middle East, Image, and Conflict and Islamism in Tunisia: From Independence to the Rising of Salafism. His forthcoming book, Sons of Ali: Shi’ism In a New International Context, will be published by the University of Costa Rica. Sergio I. Moya Mena has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since September 2016.
Simon Mills is a Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Newcastle University. Previously, he was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of History at the University of Kent. He holds a PhD from Queen Mary, University of London and his research interests lie in early-modern religious, cultural, and intellectual history. His current research explores the ways in which first-hand knowledge of the Levant—acquired by those who served the English Levant Company in Aleppo, Syria between 1620 and 1760—impacted on the development of Biblical and Oriental studies in Britain. He has held fellowships at the Council for British Research in the Levant; the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge; and the Dahlem Humanities Centre, Freie Universität, Berlin, and he has contributed articles to a number of books and journals. Simon Mills has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since October 2012.
Syed Liyaqat Hussein Moini was professor at the Centre of Advanced Study in the Department of History at Aligarh University for over forty years, during which time he supervised numerous doctoral candidates. He received his PhD from Aligarh University with a thesis on ‘The City of Ajmer during the 18th Century’. His research predominantly centres on Sufism in the Indian Sub-continent, with a particular focus on the shrine of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti in Ajmer, in respect to which he has unearthed hundreds of rare documents. He has presented his research on the Ajmer shrine at dozens of national and international conferences, and subsequently published an anthology of his journal articles relating to the shrine of Ajmer, ‘The Chishti Shrine of Ajmer, Pirs, Pilgrims and Practices’ (Jaipur, 2004). He is currently at work on a monograph entitled ‘The Daragh of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti through the Ages’. Syed Liyaqat Hussein Moini has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since September 2016.
Kazuo Morimoto is an Associate Professor in the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at the University of Tokyo. He holds a PhD from the University of Tokyo and has also taught at Hokkaido University. His research focuses on the position of sayyids and sharīfs—descendants of the Prophet Muḥammad—in Muslim societies, as well as urban and local elites in pre-Mongol Iran and the history of Shīʿah Islam. He has contributed to journals including Studia Iranica, Oriente Moderno, and The Journal of Sophia Asian Studies, and to books such as Genealogy and Knowledge in Muslim Societies: Understanding the Past (Edinburgh, 2014), Family Portraits with Saints: Hagiography, Sanctity, and Family in the Muslim World (Berlin, 2014), and Sayyids and Sharifs in Muslim Societies: The Living Links to the Prophet (London, 2012), of which he is also the editor. He has also published extensively in Japanese, including the monograph The Holy Family of Islam: The Kinsfolk of Muhammad (Tokyo, 2010). Kazuo Morimoto has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since November 2015.
Hassan Nadhem is a former Minister of Culture, Republic of Iraq. Previously, he was a Lecturer at the University of Kufa, where he was the Director of the UNESCO Chair for the Development of Inter-Religious Dialogue Studies in the Islamic World. He holds a PhD in Modern Arabic Literature from al-Mustansiriyah University, Baghdad, and his research interests focus on cross-cultural studies, hermeneutics, critical theory, linguistics, and modern Arabic literature. He is the author of Lost Poetics (2009), Text and Life (2008), and a translation of Hans-George Gadamer’s Philosophical Apprenticeship (2012). Hassan Nadhem has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since June 2014.
Nauman Naqvi is Associate Professor in the School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Habib University, where he is also Director and Founding Faculty of the Liberal Core. He has a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. Nauman Naqvi has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since June 2016.
Andrew J. Newman is a Reader in Islamic Studies and Persian at the University of Edinburgh. He holds a PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his research interests focus on the history of Shīʿah Islam, early modern Iran, and Islamic law. He is the author of Twelver Shi`ism: Unity and Diversity in the Life of Islam, 632 to 1722 (Edinburgh, 2013), Safavid Iran: Rebirth of a Persian Empire (London, 2006), and Society and Culture in the Early Modern Middle East: Studies on Iran in the Safavid Period (Leiden, 2003). He has also contributed chapters to numerous books, as well as articles to journals including Medieval Worlds, Iran, and Die Welt des Islams. Andrew J. Newman has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since January 2016.
Reza Pourjavady is a Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at the Goethe University of Frankfurt. He holds a PhD in Islamic Studies from Freie Universität Berlin and his research interests focus on the intellectual history of Shīʿah Islam from the sixteenth century to the present, post-classical Islamic philosophy, and interreligious dialogue and polemics. He is the author of Philosophy in Early Safavid Iran: Najm Al-Din Mahmud Al-Nayrizi and His Writings (Leiden, 2011), and he has contributed articles to journals including Oriens. Reza Pourjavady has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since January 2016.
Stanislav Mikhailovich Prozorov was the Head of the Department of Middle Eastern and Near Eastern Studies (2010–2013) and the Deputy Director for Academic Affairs (2005–2015) at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg, as well as the creator in 2009 of the ‘Introduction to Islamic Studies (Classical Islamic Studies)’ program at the Oriental Faculty of Saint Petersburg State University and the Russian founder in 2007 of the Islamic Culture Research Foundation in Moscow. He holds a PhD in Islamic Studies from the Leningrad Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies and his research interests focus on the doctrines and textual history of classical Islam, as well as the demography of Muslims in Russia. He is the author of Islam as an Ideological System (Moscow, 2004) and Arabic Historical Literature in Iraq, Iran, and Central Asia in the Seventh–Mid-Tenth Centuries: The Shīʿah Historical Tradition (Moscow, 1980), the translator and editor of critical editions of Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Shahrastanī’s Kitāb al-milāl wa al-nihāl (Moscow, 1984) and al-Ḥasan b. Mūsa al-Nawbakhtī’s Firāq al-shīʿah (Moscow, 1973), and the compiler and editor-in-chief of Islam in the Territories of the Former Russian Empire: An Encyclopaedic Lexicon (Moscow, 1998– ) and the compiler, editor, and author of numerous articles on the history, personalities, terminology, and doctrines of Shīʿah Islam in Islam: An Encyclopaedic Lexicon (Moscow, 1991). Stanislav Mikhailovich Prozorov has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since February 2016.
Tahera Qutbuddin was an Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. She holds a PhD in Arabic Literature from Harvard University. She is the author of Al-Mu’ayyad al-Shirazi and Fatimid Da’wa Poetry: A Case of Commitment in Classical Arabic Literature (Leiden, 2005), and the translator and editor of A Treasury of Virtues: Sayings, Sermons, and Teachings of ‘Ali (New York, 2013), an edition and translation of the Dustūr maʿālim al-ḥikam compiled by al-Qāḍī al-Quḍā’i, with the Miʾat kalimah attributed to al-Jāḥiz. Tahera Qutbuddin has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since January 2016.
Christopher Pooya Razavian was a Research Officer in the ‘Changing Structures of Islamic Authority’ (CSIE) research centre at the University of Oxford. He holds a PhD from the University of Exeter in Islamic Studies. His research focuses on the relationship between autonomy and tradition in Shīʿah Islam, and the often overlooked discursivity of these facets of Shīʿah belief. Christopher Pooya Razavian been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since July 2016.
Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi is a Professor at Aligarh Muslim University, where he is also Deputy Coordinator of the Centre for Advanced Studies in History. He holds a PhD on the urban middle class in Mughal India from Aligarh Muslim University and his research interests focus on the history and archaeology of mediaeval India, and on the Mughal dynasty in particular. He is currently co-editing the fourth volume of the Comprehensive History of India along with Professor Shireen Moosvi. He is the author of Fathpur Sikri Revisited (Oxford, 2013), and he has contributed chapters to books including Religious Movements and Institutions in Medieval India (Oxford, 2009) and Religion in Indian History (Chennai, 2007). He was also the President of the Medieval India Section of the Indian History Congress during its 2013–2014 session. Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since September 2013.
Karen G. Ruffle is an Assistant Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. She holds a PhD in Religious Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her research interests focus on ritual practices, material culture, and hagiographical narratives in Indo–Persian Shīʿah Islam; she is currently working on a project focusing on the development of Shīʿah Islam in Hyderabad, India during the Qutb Shahi sultanate. She is the author of Gender, Sainthood, and Everyday Practice in South Asian Shiʿism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2011), and she has contributed chapters to books including South Asian Religions: Tradition and Today (New York, 2012) and Islam in the Indo-Iranian World during the Modern Epoch, 1500-1900 (Berlin, 2010), and articles to journals including History of Religions, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and the Journal of Persianate Studies. Karen G. Ruffle has been Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since January 2016.
Marco Salati is an Associate Professor in the Department of Asian and Mediterranean Africa Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He holds a PhD in the History and Philology of Islamic Civilisation from the Sapienza University of Rome, and his research interests focus on the history of Shīʿah Muslims within the Ottoman Empire. He is the author of Al-Zuhrawiyyûn aw Zuhrâ zâda (1600–1700) (Homs, 2007), Il Viaggio d’inverno e il Viaggio d’estate di sayyid Muhammad Kibrit di Medina (1603–1660) (Padua, 2007), and, with Leonardo Capezzone, L’Islam sciita: Storia di una minoranza (Rome, 2006). He has also contributed chapters to books including Miscellanea Arabica (Rome, 2015), Religione e Politica: Mito, Autorità, Diritto (Rome, 2008), and The Twelver Shia in Modern Times: Religious Culture & Political History (Leiden, 2001), as well as articles to journals including Annali di Ca’ Foscari, Eurasian Studies, and Oriente Moderno. Marco Salati has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since February 2016.
Sabine Schmidtke is a Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She holds a PhD from the University of Oxford. She is the author of Theologie, Philosophie und Mystik im zwölferschiitischen Islam des 9./15. Jahrhunderts (Leiden, 2000) and, with Reza Pourjavady. Sabine Schmidtke has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since January 2016.
Vernon Schubel is a Professor of Religious Studies at Kenyon College, Ohio. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Virginia, and his research interests focus on Shīʿah Islam in Central and South Asia. He is the author of Religious Performance in Contemporary Islam: Shi’i Devotional Rituals in South Asia (Columbia, SC, 1993), and he has contributed chapters to books including The Prophet’s Ascension: Cross-Cultural Encounters with the Islamic Miʿrāj Tales (Bloomington, IN, 2010), Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe (Berkley, 1996), and Muslim Families in North America (Edmonton, 1991). Vernon Schubel has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since January 2016.
Ali Asghar Seyed-Gohrab is a Professor of Iranian and Persian Studies at the University of Utrecht. Previously, he was a Senior Lecturer in Persian Language and Literature at Leiden University. He holds a PhD in Persian Studies from Leiden University, and his research interests focus on the role of classical Persian poetry and Islamic mysticism in twentieth-century Iran. He is the author of Mirror of Dew: The Poetry of Ālam-Tāj Zhāle Qā’em-Maqāmi (Cambridge, MS, 2014), Martelaren: van mystieke weg tot oorlogspad (Amsterdam, 2009), and Courtly Riddles: Enigmatic Embellishments in Early Persian Poetry (Amsterdam, 2008). He has contributed chapters to books including A Key to the Treasures of Hakim: Artistic and Humanistic Aspects of Nizami Ganjavi’s Khamsa (Leiden, 2011), Hafiz and the School of Love in Classical Persian Poetry (London, 2010), and Studies on the Poetry of Anvari (Venice, 2006), as well as articles to journals including Der Islam, Die Welt des Islams, and Iranian Studies. Ali Asghar Seyed-Gohrab has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since February 2016.
Fabrizio Speziale is an Associate Professor in the Department of Arabic, Hebrew, Indian, and Iranian Studies at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. He holds a PhD in Social and Historical Anthropology from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and his research interests focus on the history of the sciences and the Persianate culture of South Asia. He is the author of Soufisme, religion et médecine en islam indien (Paris, 2010) and Il Trattato aureo (Risāla al-dahabiyya) sulla medicina attribuito a l’imām ‘Alī al-Riḍā (Palermo, 2009), as well as the editor of Hospitals in Iran and India, 1500–1950s (Leiden and Boston, 2012), co-editor of Muslim Cultures in the Indo-Iranian World during the Early-Modern and Modern Periods (Berlin, 2010), and chief editor of Perso-Indica. He has also contributed articles to journals including Asiatische Studien, Journal Asiatique, and Studia Iranica. Fabrizio Speziale has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since January 2016.
Edith Szanto is an Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama. She holds a PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Toronto and she conducts ethnographic research on Shīʿah practices and discourses in contemporary Syria and Iraq. She has published several articles on Shīʿah Islam in Syria, wherein she explores topics including the Karbala Paradigm, the State of Exception, and the politics of religious education. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Shi‘a Islamic Studies, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Politics of Worship in the Contemporary Middle East: Sainthood in Fragile States (Leiden, 2013). She is currently preparing a manuscript on women’s seminaries and Muharram mourning rituals in the Syrian shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab prior to the 2011 uprising. Edith Szanto has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since September 2015.
Mathieu Terrier is a Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at the École pratique des hautes études, Paris and in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Paris-La Défense. He holds a PhD from the École pratique des hautes études, specialising in the philosophy of the Safavid period and the work of Qutb al-Dīn Ashkevarī (d. c. 1679), and his research deals with the relations between Shīʿah Islam, philosophy, and Sufism. He has published papers in journals including Journal Asiatique, Studia Iranica, and Studia Islamica, and his thesis, an annotated translation of the first part of Qutb al-Dīn Ashkevarī’s Mahbūb al-qulūb, is due to be published in the near future. Mathieu Terrier has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since September 2015.
David Thurfjell is a Professor in the School of Historical and Contemporary Studies at Södertörn University, Flemingsberg. He holds a PhD from the Faculty of Theology at Uppsala University, and his research interests focus on the anthropology of popular ritual and revivalism among contemporary Shīʿah Muslims. He is the author of Shiamuslimer i Sverige: en kortfattad översikt (Bromma, 2013) and Living Shi’ism: Instances of Ritualisation Among Islamist Men in Contemporary Iran (Leiden, 2006), and he has contributed chapters to books including Iran: 4000 år av historia, konst, religion, litteratur och språk (Uppsala, 2014), Shi‘i Islam and Identity: Religion, Politics and Change in the Global Muslim Community (London, 2012), and Religion, Politics, and Globalization: Anthropological Approaches (New York, 2011), as well as articles to journals including Religion and Temenos. David Thurfjell has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since February 2016.
Richard David Williams is a Senior Lecturer in Music and South Asian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Previously, he was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford. He holds a PhD in Cultural History and Music from King’s College London, with the dissertation title of ‘Hindustani Music between Awadh and Bengal, c.1758–1905’. His research interests focus on the cultural and intellectual history of early-modern and colonial South Asia; North Indian literature, musicology, and aesthetics; and court cultures under the Late Mughals and British colonialism. He has contributed articles to journals including Modern Asian Studies. Richard David Williams has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since January 2016.
Richard K. Wolf is a Professor of Music at Harvard University. He holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, focussing on the music and ritual of the Kotas of the Nilgiri Hills. His research interests include emotional complexity in ceremonial contexts, the constitutive properties of musical action in rituals, the poetics of non-verbal activities, the musical qualities of languages, and the analytic potentials of particular languages for the study of music. He is the author of The Voice in the Drum (Urbana, IL, 2014) and The Black Cow’s Footprint: Time, Space, and Music in the Lives of the Kotas of South India (Delhi, 2005; Urbana, IL, 2006), and has contributed articles to journals including American Ethnologist, Asian Ethnology, and Performing Islam. Richard K. Wolf has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since January 2016.
Cyrus Ali Zargar is a Professor in Islamic Studies at the University of Central Florida. Previously he was an Associate Professor of Religion and Co-Director of Honours Programs at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. He holds a PhD in Near-Eastern Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include the intersection of Sufi virtue ethics and literature, as well as the relationship between Sufism and Shīʿī mysticism. He is the author of Sufi Aesthetics: Beauty, Love, and the Human Form in the Writings of Ibn ʿArabi and ʿIraqi (Columbia, SC, 2011), as well as articles in the Journal of Arabic Literature, The Muslim World, and Iranian Studies. His forthcoming book, The Polished Mirror, concerns classical Islamic virtue ethics in its various literary forms, in Sufism, and in Islamic philosophy. Cyrus Ali Zargar has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since September 2013.