Biography
M. Shobhana Xavier is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She completed her Ph.D in Religion and Culture at Wilfrid Laurier-Waterloo University in Waterloo, Canada. Her areas of interest are in contemporary Sufism, especially in South Asian traditions of Sufism in North America. Her doctoral research mapped the transnational communities of the Tamil itinerant, Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (d. 1986), from Sri Lanka to America through sacred spaces, rituals and collective imagination—and engaged with how different articulations of pieties and devotion to a singular teacher (Bawa) resulted in varying interpretative tendencies of Sufism (Islamic, Hindu and universal).