Biography
Khurram Hussain is a native of Pakistan, and has lived, worked and studied in the US for the last 22 years. He graduated with an A.B in Religion and Physics from Bowdoin University in 1997 and spent the next few years working first in corporate America, and then (thankfully) with a small non-profit publishing house in Cambridge MA that specialized in Budhhist texts. Hussain returned to graduate school in the spring of 2002 and earned an M.A.R from Yale Divinity School in 2004. He continued his doctoral studies at Yale and received his PhD. from the Department of Religious Studies in December 2011. Hussain’s dissertation, titled “Islam as Critique,” is an examination of the work of the 19th century Muslim reformer Sayyid Ahmad Khan as a ‘mediatory discourse’ between Islamic societies and their Western counterparts. Hussain is broadly interested in exploring the possibility of a robust critical conversation across diverse cultures and traditions, and has extensive training in comparative ethics, historical sociology and modern Western philosophy. His course offerings at Lehigh have so far included classes on modern and South Asian Islam, comparative ethics, nationalism and critics of modernity. He is also an active member of the Center for Global Islamic Studies, the Humanities Center and several other initiatives and programs across the university. In 2011, Hussain was awarded the 2011 Waves Award as Male Faculty Ally by the Women’s Center at Lehigh University.