Dr. Mohammad Nabeel Jafri

Mohammad Nabeel Jafri holds a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada) Postdoctoral Fellowship at CeMIS. He is a scholar of Islam in modern South Asia, with a particular focus on Twelver Shiʿi practice in Pakistan. His doctoral dissertation, "Orating Knowledge: Urdu Shiʿi Khiṭābat in Contemporary Karachi," was defended in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto, in July 2024. His dissertation was awarded the 2024 S. S. Pirzada Dissertation Prize in Pakistan Studies, by The Institute for South Asia Studies, University of California, Berkeley.

His doctoral research was funded by a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (2019–2022), multiple Ontario Graduate Scholarships (2018, 2022, 2023), and an inaugural Al-Mahdi Doctoral Fellowship (2023). His recent publications include "Indexing Imams" in Journal of the American Academy of Religion (forthcoming), "Husain's University" in Asian Ethnology (forthcoming), and "Orating Origins" in Critical Pakistan Studies (2024). He is broadly interested in scholarship on semiotics, ritual practice, authority, and language use.