Zulfikar Hirji is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University, Toronto. He is interested in how human societies articulate, represent and perform understandings of self, community, and other, and on issues of knowledge production, representation and identity, visual, material, and sensory culture, and critical pedagogy. His ethnographic and archival research focuses on Muslim societies in a range of historical and contemporary contexts including coastal East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and South Asia. He received his DPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford, MPhil in Islamic Studies from the University of Cambridge, and BA (Joint Honours) in Religious Studies & Anthropology from McGill University.