Benjamin Soares

Benjamin Soares, an anthropologist, was a senior researcher at the ASCL until 2016. Since 2015 he has been Professor (by special appointment) of the Anthropology of Islam in Africa and its Diaspora at the University of Amsterdam. He is the past chair of the ASCL's Researchers' Assembly, having served two consecutive terms. He has taught previously at Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Sussex and held fellowships at the University of Chicago and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is a scholar of Islam and Muslim societies in Africa whose research focuses particularly on religious life from the early 20th century to the present. He has conducted research in Mali, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sudan. In recent work, he has looked at the connections between changing modalities of religious expression, different modes of belonging, and emergent social imaginaries in colonial and postcolonial West Africa. In addition to ongoing research on religion, the public sphere, and media, he is studying contemporary Muslim public intellectuals in Africa.

He is the author of Islam and the Prayer Economy: History and Authority in a Malian Town (University of Michigan Press & Edinburgh University Press for the International African Institute, 2005); editor of Muslim-Christian Encounters in Africa (Brill, 2006); co-editor of Islam, Politics, Anthropology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) with Filippo Osella; co-editor of Islam, État et société en Afrique (Karthala, 2009) and Islam and Muslim Politics in Africa (Palgrave, 2007), both with René Otayek; and co-editor of New Media and Religious Transformations in Africa (Indiana, 2015) with Rosalind Hackett. He also co-edits the Brill series, Studies of Religion in Africa.