We are delighted to announce that Professor Murad Idris has been appointed as the interim director of the Global Islamic Studies Center for the 2023 Winter semester while Aliyah Khan is on leave with the Michigan Humanities Fellowship. Professor Idris is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Prior to joining Michigan in 2021, he was an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia. He received his PhD in political science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Idris is a political theorist with interests in war and peace, critical theory, conceptual history, anticolonial thought, political theology, and Arabic and Islamic political thought. He is the author of the multi-award-winning book War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought (Oxford, 2019), and he edited The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory (Oxford, 2020) with Leigh Jenco (LSE) and Megan Thomas (UC Santa Cruz). He’s presently working on a book about the constructions of Islam in relation to tropes about submission, progress, and violence, as well as a short book about Sayyid Qutb’s critical and global thought.

Please join us in welcoming Professor Idris to the II Community and to his new role at the II!