Past Scholars and Affiliates

Former director

Amal Ghazal was born and raised in Lebanon, where she attended the American University of Beirut and earned a BA in History. She moved to Canada in 1996. She completed her MA and PhD at the University of Alberta, and held a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto. She was a faculty member in the History Department at Dalhousie University between 2006 and 2017. She specializes in the history of the Middle East and Muslim societies in Africa. Her writings have covered several regions, including the western Indian Ocean, the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa.

A conversation with Dr. Amal Ghazal

Founding director

Dr. Derryl MacLean is the founding Director of the Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies at Simon Fraser University.  A social historian of religion with a concern for the social consequences of religious contact and change, his research spans ‘Abbasid and Fatimid history on the eastern frontier and the initial encounter with Buddhism and Hinduism; early modern millennial, communal, and apocalyptic movements in the Persianate world; and diasporic Muslim communities in the West.  He is the author of numerous scholarly articles, the book Religion and Society in Arab Sind (“Theoretical Studies in Sociology and Anthropology,” E.J. Brill, 1989), and the co-editor of Cosmopolitanism in Muslim Contexts: Perspectives from the Past (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).