People

Amira Mittermaier’s own research focuses on lived Islam in present-day Egypt. Her award-winning first book Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination (University of California Press, 2010) explores Muslim practices of dream interpretation, as they are inflected by Islamic reformism, Western psychology, and mass mediation. Her second book, Giving to God: Islamic Charity in Revolutionary Times (University of California Press, 2019), describes a religious ethics of giving against the backdrop of the Egyptian uprising. Her most recent book, Ninety-Nine: A Kaleidoscopic Portrait of God (Duke University, 2026) draws together stories about God-human relations in post-revolutionary Egypt, offering an “ethnography of God”—a project that Mittermaier lays out programmatically in her articles “Beyond the Human Horizon” and “Toward an Ethnography of God.” Currently, Mittermaier is also engaged in a collaborative interview-based research project on lived Islamic theologies in Gaza since 2023.

As Professor in both the Department for the Study of Religion and the Department of Anthropology, Mittermaier’s teaching ranges from courses on Islam and the Middle East to courses on fieldwork methods and ethnographic writing. She has received numerous awards and recognitions for her scholarship, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was named to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars.

Sharifa’s research examines Islamophobia within Canadian policies and how these policies specifically affect Muslim families. Her dissertation research analyzed framings of the Muslim family as a space of patriarchal violence in Canadian news media and political discourses (such as House of Commons debates). In her capacity as the W. P. Bell Postdoctoral Fellow at Mount Allison University, she examined Canada’s intercountry adoption policy which restricts intercountry adoptions from countries that use the Islamic practice of kafala, arguing that the policy is inherently Islamophobic.

Her current postdoctoral project examines the understudied area of Muslim children’s and Muslim families’ relationships with Canada’s child welfare systems and focuses specifically on Muslim children in care in Ontario. Using qualitative methods, this research centers the experiences of Muslim families and Muslim children with Ontario’s child welfare system. This analysis addresses the necessity of tracking and maintaining data on Muslim children in care. As a result, the aim of this research is to also use quantitative methods to develop an archive of disaggregated data to better assess the prevalence of Islamophobia within Ontario’s child welfare system.

Sharifa is also the co-managing editor of the online, open-access journal, Feral Feminisms as well as an external associate for the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies at York University. 

Anver M. Emon’s research centers on the study of Islamic law and history.  His publications address both premodern histories of Islamic law, and how those histories are deployed in contemporary debates on governance and the rule of law at a time when the spectre of ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslim’ are highly politicized tropes in public debate around the world.  A professor in both the Faculty of Law and Department of History, Emon’s teachings range from foundational courses in legal education (constitutional law and statutory interpretation), to historical methods courses that center the study of Islamic law and comparative law. He has received numerous awards and recognition for his scholarship, having been the 2014 Guggenheim Fellow in Law,  appointed to the College of the Royal Society of Canada and awarded its 2017 Kitty Newman Memorial Award in Philosophy, and named a Senior Fellow to Massey College.  

In addition to publishing numerous articles, Professor Emon is the author of The ‘Islamic’ Deployed: The Study of Islam in Four Registers (Middle East Law and Governance, 2019), Islamic Natural Law Theories (Oxford University Press, 2010), and Religious Pluralism and Islamic Law: Dhimmis and Others in the Empire of Law(Oxford University Press, 2012), as well as the co-editor of Islamic Law and International Human Rights Law: Searching for Common Ground? (Oxford University Press, 2012).  His most recent book, Jurisdictional Exceptionalisms (Cambridge University Press, 2021), (co-authored with Urfan Khaliq) interrogates the fields of private international law and Islamic law as they impose themselves on the bodies of children abducted by parents across state borders. 

Prior to joining Toronto Metropolitan University in July 2022, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto. He obtained his PhD at the School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University. His doctoral research, supported by SSHRC and the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, comparatively examined the securitization of Muslim civil society organizations under national security regimes in Canada and the U.K. He is currently preparing a book manuscript based on his dissertation.

Fahad is an interdisciplinary scholar interested in critical terrorism/radicalization studies; racialized practices of national security policing and surveillance; civil society and resistance; and justice and community-oriented approaches to the study of philanthropy. His scholarship is informed by 15 years of work experience in community and nonprofit organizations in Canada and the U.S. His ongoing projects include work on the SSHRC Connection Grant, “Critical Reflections on Security, 9/11 and the Canadian Settler Colony,” and the SSHRC Partnership Development Grant, “Justice Philanthropy: An international Research-to-Practice Network.” He is also the co-lead for the critical national security hub housed at the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto.

She has published widely on topics related to Muslims and Islam in Europe, particularly in Germany and France, with a focus on political secularism, knowledge production, body politics, and governmentality. Her latest monograph, Interrogating Muslims: The Liberal-Secular Matrix of Integration, was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2022.

In her current research, she explores the relationship between “reason of state” (Staatsräson) and the securitization of knowledge production in contemporary Germany. Another ongoing project examines the political rationalities underlying state-organized Islamism prevention.