IAHR Executive Committee Members
Prof. Aaron Hughes
Department of Religion and Classics
University of Rochester
Rush Rhees Library, 4th floor
P.O. Box 270074
Rochester, NY 14627
Further Member: Prof. Aaron Hughes
Aaron W. Hughes was trained in the history of Islam and the critical study of religion. He has spent much of his academic career studying the tradition (or better traditions) in other times and places. Representative examples of his work may be found in Shared Identities: Medieval and Modern Imaginings of Judeo-Islam (Oxford, 2017), Muslim and Jew: Origins, Growth, Resentment (Routledge, 2019), An Anxious Inheritance: Religious Others and the Shaping of Sunnī Orthodoxy (Oxford, 2022). He has also written on the “meta” issues involved in the study of Islam in his trilogy with Equinox Press: Situating Islam: The Past and Future of an Academic Discipline (2007), Theorizing Islam: Disciplinary Deconstruction and Reconstruction (2012) and Islam and the Tyranny of Authenticity: An Inquiry into Disciplinary Apologetics and Self-Deception (2015), For a summary of his combination of Islamic studies and critical religion for undergraduates, see his Muslim Identities: An Introduction to Islam (Columbia, 2013; 2nd ed. Equinox, 2024).
That was then. Recent years have seen Hughes turn his attention to documenting the history of Muslim communities in his home country of Canada. In addition to his work as an academic advisor to the Muslims in Canada Archive (MiCA) Project, he is the author of Islam: A Canadian History (Toronto, 2026) and the forthcoming A History of Ismaili Muslims in Canada (Bloomsbury, 2026).