Aqiil Gopee is a PhD student from Mauritius interested in the intersections between archaeology and religion in the Indian Ocean, East African and Islamic worlds. He investigates sacred economies, the production of gods, ancient land management, world-building, technologies of self and archaeologies of knowledge, with attentiveness to questions of heritage, colonialism, commerce, semantics, as well as multispecies interactions.

He graduated magna cum laude from Amherst College with a degree in Religion and an honors thesis about the Qur’ān as literature, and also holds an MTS in Comparative Religion from Harvard Divinity School, where he researched the jinn and dabbled in Akkadian. In his gap year between Harvard and UChicago, he participated in archaeological excavations in Oman, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Mauritius and Palestine.

He is also a creative writer; his short-story, Insectarium, won the prestigious Prix du Jeune Écrivain de Langue Française (PJEF) and was published in Paris in 2023.