Aziza Shanazarova is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Columbia University, where she specializes in the religious history of Islamic Central Asia and the broader Persianate world, with an emphasis on the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. She holds a dual PhD in Religious Studies and Central Eurasian Studies, completed at Indiana University-Bloomington in 2019. Before joining Columbia, Aziza taught at Stanford University and the University of Pittsburgh. She recently published Female Religiosity in Central Asia: Sufi Leaders in the Persianate World (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and Manifestations of a Sufi Woman in Central Asia: A Critical Edition of Ḥāfiẓ-i Baṣīr’s Maẓhar al-ʻajā’ib (Leiden: Brill, 2020). Her peer-reviewed articles have appeared in Der Islam, Journal of Sufi Studies, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, and Journal of Islamic Manuscripts.
