Noor Zaidi

Prof. Zaidi is a scholar of the Middle East and South Asia. She specializes in the history of gender, sectarianism, and Shi’a Islam in national and transnational spaces.

Her current book manuscript analyzes how the seventh-century figure, Zaynab bint Ali, granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammed, has been used in 20th-century contexts, tracing the development and evolution of pilgrimage to two female shrines in Syria (the Sayeda Zaynab shrine) and Pakistan (Bibi Pak Daman) and prisons in Iraq as sites of memory and identity construction. Based on oral interviews, fieldwork and archival research in Syria, Pakistan, and Iraq, Prof. Zaidi’s work explores the physical and imaginative spaces in which identity is made and contested and shows how transnational narratives become embedded in local contexts.

Prof. Zaidi’s research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the SSRC, the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as from the Dresher Center for the Humanities and UMBC’s Office of Research and Creative Achievement. Most recently, she has been awarded a National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) yearlong fellowship to complete her book project.

At UMBC, Prof. Zaidi teaches a wide range of classes, from Hist 312 (The Modern Middle East) to Hist 386 (Hindus, Muslims, and their Others) and Hist 379 (Women, Gender, and Islam). She also teaches courses on Islamic empires and Islamic movements. Prof Zaidi looks forward to bringing more new courses to the department and highlighting underrepresented voices in historical scholarship, using her research experience in various regions and topics.