Shahzad Bashir

Shahzad Bashir is the Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities and Professor of History at Brown University, specializing in the intellectual and social history of Iran, Central and South Asia from the late medieval period to the present. He earned his AB summa cum laude from Amherst College in 1991 and PhD from Yale University in 1998. Prior to Brown, where he joined in 2017, Bashir was on the faculty at Stanford University for ten years, serving as the Lysbeth Warren Anderson Professor in Islamic Studies and director of the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies. At Brown, he directed the Center for Middle East Studies from 2018 to 2020 and established the Islam and the Humanities research project. His scholarship explores temporality, poetry, Sufism, Shi’ism, messianic movements, and religious representations of corporeality. Currently, he is developing a project on multilingual literature produced in India during 1750-1850, correlating literary evidence, art, and architecture, and theorizing historical narration through anamorphic photography.

Bashir has authored five books: A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures (MIT Press, 2022), a digital monograph; The Market in Poetry in the Persian World (Cambridge University Press, 2021); Sufi Bodies: Religion and Society in Medieval Islam (Columbia University Press, 2011); Fazlallah Astarabadi and the Hurufis (Oneworld, 2005); and Messianic Hopes and Mystical Visions: The Nūrbakhshīya Between Medieval and Modern Islam (University of South Carolina Press, 2003). He has published over 40 articles in journals including History and Theory, History of Religions, and Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient. His work has earned fellowships from the Andrew Carnegie Corporation, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, and Stanford Humanities Center. In 2020, he received Brown University's Presidential Faculty Award. Bashir edits the Islamic Humanities series (University of California Press), co-edits Islamicate Intellectual History (Brill), and is associate editor of History and Theory. His contributions have profoundly influenced Islamic historiography, Sufi studies, and interdisciplinary approaches to Persianate intellectual traditions.

Professional Email: shahzad_bashir@brown.edu