Saba Mahmood

Saba Mahmood is professor of social cultural anthropology at University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, she is also affiliated with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Institute of South Asian Studies, and the program in Critical Theory. Her scholarly work straddles debates in anthropology and political theory, with a focus on Muslim majority societies of the Middle East and South Asia. Mahmood has made major theoretical contributions to rethinking the relationship between ethics and politics, religion and secularism, freedom and submission, and reason and embodiment. Influenced by the work of Talal Asad, she has written on issues of gender, religious politics, secularism, and Muslim and non-Muslim relations in the Middle East.

Career

Mahmood received her PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University in 1998. She also holds masters degrees in Political Science, Architecture, and Urban Planning. Prior to joining Berkeley in 2004, she taught at the University of Chicago.

Mahmood has held visiting appointments at the American Academy in Berlin, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and Leiden University. She has taught at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, the Venice School of Human Rights, and Institute of Global Law and Policy. She was a co-convener of the Summer Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory at the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Irvine. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University, and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Carnegie Corporation, the Henry Luce Foundation, and Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies. She currently serves on the editorial boards of Anthropology Today, L’Homme, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Her work has been translated into Arabic, French, Persian, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, and Polish.

Bibliography

• Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
• Politics of Religious Freedom. (Co-edited with Winifred Sullivan, Elizabeth Hurd, and Peter Danchin). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
• Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. With Talal Asad, Wendy Brown and Judith Butler. Fordham University Press, 2013. (First edition published by the University of California Press, 2009).
• The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012 (First edition: 2005)

External links

• Interview in Le Monde on Saba Mahmood's work on controversy over Muhammed's cartoon
• Interview in Mediapart on the anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo murders in France
• Interview on "Religious Liberty, Minorities and Islam" for the Social Science Research Council's “The Immanent Frame” Blog
• Interview on CBC radio with Saba Mahmood on "Myth of the Secular"