Professor Mahmood passed away in March 2018. She was previously a member of the Haas Institute's Religious Diversity faculty cluster. Learn more about her life and academic work here.
Saba Mahmood taught graduate courses on secularism and secularity; violence and hope; human rights and sovereignty; ethics and politics; modern religious hermeneutics; religion and the body; as well as modern anthropological theory. Her undergraduate courses focused on sexuality and gender; feminist theory and postcolonialism; anthropology of the Middle East and Islam; anthropology of religion; and ethnographic research and methodology. Her book, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report, examines conditions of secular governance that have exacerbated the plight of non-Muslim minorities in the modern Middle East, with a special focus on Egypt.
Professor Mahmood received her PhD in anthropology from Stanford University. She held professional degrees in architecture and urban planning, and worked in these fields before pursuing anthropology.
