Malika Zeghal Named Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor

Cambridge, Mass. June 3, 2010 - Malika Zeghal, who has examined the changing relationship between Islam and governments across the Middle East, has been appointed Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor in Contemporary Islamic Thought and Life at Harvard University, effective July 1, 2010. Zeghal is currently associate professor of the anthropology and sociology of religion at the University of Chicago's Divinity School, where she has been a member of the faculty since 2005. She joins Harvard's Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and Committee on the Study of Religion. "Professor Zeghal's scholarship is grounded in her remarkable ability to win the trust and confidence of the Islamic religious actors about whom she writes," says Diana Sorensen, dean of arts and humanities in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "Her ethnographic approach, based on her interviews, fieldwork, and reconstruction of the biographies of key players in the Arab world, gives her work remarkable power. An excellent and versatile teacher at Chi-cago, she will no doubt become a fine colleague and a great asset to us here at Harvard." Zeghal's research focuses on the changing relationship between Arab states, religious institutions, and Islamist movements over the last 50 years.