Kaufman Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall
Asef Bayat (ISIM Professor at Leiden University, The Netherlands)
Asef Bayat (Ph.D. University of Kent, 1984) is academic director of
the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World
(ISIM) and ISIM Chair at Leiden University, The Netherlands.
He taught sociology and Middle East studies at the American University in Cairo.
He has held visiting positions at the University of California,
Berkeley; Columbia University, New York, and the University of Oxford.
His academic interests range from Political Sociology, Social
Movements, to Urban Space and Politics, International Development,
Contemporary Middle East, and Islam and the Modern World. He has
conducted ethnographic research in the areas of popular mobilization
in the Iranian Revolution; labor movements; politics of the urban
poor; development NGOs; everyday cosmopolitanism; comparative
Islamisms; and Muslim youth cultural politics, primarily in Iran and
Egypt. . He is the author of Workers and Revolution in Iran (London,
1987); Work, Politics and Power (New York, 1991), and Street Politics
(New York, 1998); and most recently Making Islam Democratic: Social
Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2007).
