Statements by Incoming and Outgoing IIS Directors

Dear IIS community,

I’m thrilled and honoured to be taking on the role of Director of the Institute of Islamic Studies. Since being founded in 2013, the IIS has become a vibrant hub for Islamic Studies at UofT and beyond. I’m grateful to Professor Walid Saleh, the institute’s inaugural Director, and Professor Anver Emon, Director from 2018 to 2026, for their leadership and vision. Special thanks to Anver for his tireless support during the transition! I am also grateful to the IIS staff for all their hard work behind the scenes and for the warm welcome.

I started my academic journey in the field of Islamic Studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany, before moving to the United States (first Michigan, then New York) where I discovered my love for anthropology. My passion is ethnographic research and writing. For the past 19 years, I have been teaching across the Departments for the Study of Religion, Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, and Anthropology at UofT St George. My research explores Muslim life-worlds via ethnography, specifically in Egypt. I’m interested in lived theologies, embodied ethics, and the invisible, and I have written books on dreams, Islamic charity, and God-imaginaries in post-revolutionary Egypt. More recently, I’ve embarked on a collaborative, interview-based project on Islam in Gaza since 2023.

I had the privilege of serving on the provostial Muslim Arab Palestinian Discrimination Working Group (MAP DWG) in 2025-2026. Having heard from staff, students, and faculty across our three campuses, I am keenly aware of the need for safe spaces for discussion, networking, and academic belonging. We’re living through dark and daunting times, ones marked not only by ongoing genocidal warfare, settler colonial expansionism, and promises to erase entire civilizations, but also ones in which speaking up can be criminalized, and when the mode of “business as usual” in classrooms and across the university weighs like a rock on people with ties to those being bombed. I am committed to holding open a space in which Islamic Studies can thrive, academic freedom is protected, and diverse voices are heard. Regardless of our individual research interests, I believe that we need to ask what it means to be doing “Islamic Studies” after October 2023, just as 9/11 marked and altered our field lastingly. My hope is that we can continue thinking through such questions collectively at the IIS, and I look forward to collaborating with Hearing Palestine and future iterations of Palestine Studies at UofT. I plan to continue building on my ongoing collaboration with colleagues in Europe, and specifically Germany, who are similarly thinking through the politics of knowledge production in our field in relation to geopolitics.

My primary goal for 2026-27 is to open the IIS to an even larger number of colleagues and students interested in the study of Islam. I look forward to hosting events, lectures, and workshops, and to launching a work-in-progress series and a methods café. I also look forward to working with the Muslims in Canada Archives (MiCA), a thriving initiative that began under Professor Emon’s leadership and that seeks to document and share the lives and experiences of Muslims across Canada. I’m excited to welcome three new postdocs to the IIS in September whose work showcases methodological and conceptual innovation in the field of Islamic Studies. Keep an eye out for a fuller introduction in a future newsletter and for an IIS Open House event on September 25, and please stay tuned for our programming for 2026-27.

I hope you will all join us regularly for events at the IIS. Please reach out to me if you have ideas for an event or workshop that you think the IIS might be able to support. I’m always happy to meet for a coffee so drop me a line and stop by the IIS for a visit!

If you’re a UofT faculty member who works in the field of Islamic Studies broadly conceived and would like to be listed as an IIS affiliate on the website, please fill out this form.

Ultimately, the IIS will continue thriving in and through community. I look forward to engaging with you in the months and years ahead.

Amira Mittermaier
Director of the Institute of Islamic Studies
Professor of Religion and Anthropology

Outgoing Director Anver M. Emon reflects on his time leading the Institute.
Read the full statement.