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. She was born in Pakistan in 1962.

Mahmood received her PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University in 1998. She also holds master's 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. Her book The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject received the 2005 Victoria Schuck Award from the American Political Science Association and was an honorable mention for the 2005 Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association. Her book Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report received the 2016 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. She currently serves on the editorial boards of Representations,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.

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