Associate Professor of Anthropology and Social Sciences in the College

Associated faculty, Divinity School

PhD, Johns Hopkins University, 2005

On leave Fall 2022-Winter 2023


Hussein has ongoing research interests in the anthropology of law, religion, Islam, and the Middle East; and in secularism, law and colonial power, phenomenology, and the genealogies of sovereignty and emergency states.


Contact Information

Office: Haskell 238
Phone: (773) 834-4496
Email: hagrama@uchicago.edu


Selected Publications

2020
Secularity, Synchronicity and Uncanny Science: Considerations and Challenges. Zygon: A Journal of Science and Religion.

2016
Justice between Islamic Shari'a and Western Legal Tradition: Remarks on the Comparative Context. In Soraya A. Turki, ed., A Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East.

2015
Religious Freedom and the Bind of Suspicion in Contemporary Secularity. In Saba Mahmood, Winifred Fallers Sullivan, Elizabeth S. Hurd, eds., After Secular Law.

2012
Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty and the Rule of Law in Egypt. University of Chicago Press.

Hussein Ali Agrama's book "Questioning Secularism"

2012
Reflections on Secularism, Democracy and Politics in Egypt. American Ethnologist, 39(1): 26-31.

2011
Sovereign Power and Secular Indeterminacy: Is Egypt a Secular or a Religious State? In Sullivan, Yelle & Taussig-Rubbo, eds., After Secular Law, Stanford University Press, 181-200.

2010
Ethics, Authority, Tradition: Towards an Anthropology of the Fatwa. American Ethnologist, 37(1): 2-18.

2010
Secularism, Sovereignty, Indeterminacy: Is Egypt a Secular or a Religious State? Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52(3): 1-29.

2006
Asking the Right Questions: Two Engagements with Islam and Modernity. Political Theory, 35(5):647-56.

2005
Law Courts and Fatwa Councils in Modern Egypt: An Ethnography of Islamic Legal Practice. PhD Dissertation, Johns Hopkins University.