Irfana Hashmi's research interests include Mamluk and Ottoman social history, Islamic law and society, Muslim educational cultures and the transmission of knowledge, material religion, urban studies, and gender and sexuality in the Middle East/North Africa. She is currently writing a book on the social world of learning at al-Azhar in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In addition to teaching a wide range of classes in Religious Studies at Whittier College, she also teaches classes in classical and medieval Islamic history, Islam and City: Medieval and Modern, and the Emergence of the Modern Middle East. Her dissertation, entitled Patronage, Legal Practice, and Space in al-Azhar, 1500-1650, presents a textured portrait of the religious, social, and cultural lives of early-modern Muslim scholarly elites at al-Azhar, connecting the intellectual paths of pre-modern Islamic thinkers with the everyday backgrounds and worlds that they inhabited. Irfana received her B.A. in English and Religious Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in English and American Literature from CUNY: Hunter College, and an M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from New York University. Irfana joined the Whittier faculty in Fall 2014. 

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