Alison Laywine is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy, McGill University. She is the author of a new book, Kant's Transcendental Deduction: a Cosmology of Experience, forthcoming at Oxford University Press. Her interests extend to philosophical treatments of music theory as a branch of mixed mathematics in antiquity and the early modern period, and she is working on the first complete translation from the Arabic into English of Farabi's Kitab al-musiqa al-kabir.
Katherine Lemons is Assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology, McGill University. Her research focuses on Islamic family law adjudication in India, which is a subject that has implications for understanding Muslim gender and kin relations, secularism, minority politics, and legal pluralism. Her book, Divorcing Traditions: Islamic Marriage Law and the Making of Indian Secularism (Cornell University Press 2019) is an ethnography of Islamic legal practices and expertise in India; it argues that Muslim divorce is a key site for understanding contemporary Indian secularism.
Khalid Mustafa Medani is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and the Institute of Islamic Studies, and Chair of the African Studies Program at McGill University. He has published widely on the roots of civil conflict and the funding of the Islamic movement in Sudan, the question of informal finance and terrorism in Somalia, the obstacles to state building in Iraq, and the role of informal networks in the rise of Islamic militancy.
Pasha M. Khan is Chair in Urdu Language and Culture at the Institute of Islamic Studies, working on South Asian literature in Urdu-Hindi, Persian, Punjabi, and Arabic. His forthcoming (2019) monograph is entitled The Broken Spell: Indian Storytelling and the Romance Genre in Persian and Urdu. His new projects consider Islamicate romances' representations of ethical exemplarity, generosity, and the gift; male and female masculinities and heteronormativity; and patronage and praise at the court of the Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh. He teaches courses on romances, Sufism, Urdu-Hindi language and poetry, and the cultural history of South Asia.
Rula Jurdi Abisaab is Professor of Islamic History at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University. She teaches in all areas of Islamic-Shi‘ite history and is especially interested in the transformation of juristic thought, the ‘ulama’s legal authority and relations of power in Shi‘ite society during 16th and 17th-century Iran. Her research focuses on religion and power in Safavid Iran, exploring the interface of the shari‘a with Sufism and heterodoxy, a part of which has been presented in her book Converting Persia: Religion and Power in Safavid Iran (I.B. Tauris 2004). More recently, she has co-authored Shi‘ites of Lebanon: Modernism, Communism and Hizbullah’s Islamists (Syracuse University Press 2014).
Setrag Manoukian teaches at McGill University at the Institute of Islamic Studies and the Department of Anthropology, which he currently chairs. He is an Italian anthropologist interested in knowledge and its relationship with power, understood both as existential and social force. His area of specialty is Iran, and he is the author of City of Knowledge in Twentieth Century Iran: Shiraz, History, Poetry (Routledge 2012).
Subho Basu is Professor at the Department of History, McGill University. His teaching interests encompass ancient and medieval India, the making of modern India, the history of Pakistan and Bangladesh, the British Empire through films, and subaltern studies and new social history. He has published widely in labour history, communist politics in Bengal, the developmental history of Nepal, and the contemporary history of Indian politics. He is the author of Does Class Matter?: Colonial Capital and Workers' Resistance in Bengal, 1890-1937 (Oxford University Press 2004), and is currently researching the formation of Bangladesh.
Veysel Şimşek teaches Turkish at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University. His research and teaching interests include the political, social, and intellectual history of the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic (c. 1750–1950).