Ali A. Mazrui Senior Fellow

Ali A. Mazrui Senior Fellow

Majid Hannoum is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kansas, USA. He earned a Ph.D. in Arabic and Comparative Literature from Sorbonne University, France and a second Ph.D. in History and Anthropology from Princeton University, USA. He is the editor of Practicing Sufism: Sufi Politics and Performance in Africa (2016) and the author of several books, including Secular Narrations and Transdisciplinary Knowledge (2023), The Invention of the Maghreb: Between Africa and the Middle East (2021), Living Tangier: Migration, Race, and Illegality in a Moroccan City (2020), Violent Modernity: France in Algeria (2010), and Colonial Histories, Postcolonial Memories: The Legend of the Kahina, a North African Heroine (2001).

He has held teaching positions at Princeton University, the College of New Jersey, the New School for Social Research in NYC, and Bard College. His research experience includes roles as a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, and a Senior Fulbright Fellow (twice). He has also served as a Senior Fellow at the Aga Khan Centre in London.

During his current fellowship, Dr. Hannoum is working on a book that explores the formation of French secularism in Algeria and its interactions with local belief systems, including Islam and Judaism. The project also investigates how the development of secularism has led to new forms of secularity and religiosity that have persisted beyond the colonial period.