Professor Mahmood teaches graduate courses on secularism and secularity; violence and hope; human rights and sovereignty; ethics and politics; modern religious hermeneutics; religion and the body; as well as modern anthropological theory. Her undergraduate courses focus on sexuality and gender; feminist theory and postcolonialism; anthropology of the Middle East and Islam; anthropology of religion; and ethnographic research and methodology. Her work focuses on the relationship between religious and secular politics in postcolonial societies with special attention to issues of sovereignty, subject formation, law, and gender/sexuality. Her work is best known for its interrogation of liberal assumptions about the proper boundary between ethics and politics, freedom and unfreedom, the religious and the secular, and agency and submission. Currently she is working on questions of political violence and survival, with a focus on Sunni-Shia relations in South Asia and the Middle East.
