Contact Information
University of Illinois
3086 Lincoln Hall
702 S. Wright Street
Urbana, IL 61801
USA
Biography
Asef Bayat is Professor of Sociology, and the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the Department of Sociology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Before joining Illinois, Bayat taught at the American University in Cairo for many years, and served as the director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) holding the Chair of Society and Culture of the Modern Middle East at Leiden University, The Netherlands.In the meantime, he had visiting positions at the Universality of California, Berkeley, Colombia University, Oxford, and Brown.
Research Interests
Political Sociology; Social Movements and Social Change; Religion and Public Life; Urban Life and Politics; Islam and Modernity; Contemporary Middle East.
Research Description
My current research concerns an understanding of the Arab revolutions-- historically, comparatively, and sociologically. In particular I am interested in exploring the place of popular classes in these revolutions. I like to narrate the story of these (notably the Tunisian and Egyptian) revolutions from the perspective of subaltern classes.
Education
Ph.D, Universoty of Kent (UK)
Awards and Honors
Elected as Chair of Islam in the Modern World, University of Leiden; Inaugural Agha Khan Chair of Islamic Humanities at Brown University; Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, University of Illinois; Named as Ford Foundation Fellow, MacArthur Fellow, Open Society Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, Wissenschaftskolleg Fellow, Berlin.
Courses Taught
Global Religion and Politics; Megacities of Global South; Collective Action and Revolution; Social Movements; Middle Eastern Societies and Cultures
Additional Campus Affiliations
Professor, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
Recent Publications
Bayat, A. (2017). Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring. (Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures). Stanford University Press.
Bayat, A. (2016). Foreword. In S. Fadaee (Ed.), Understanding Southern Social Movements (pp. xxii-xxiv). Taylor and Francis Inc.. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315708843
Bayat, A. (2015). Plebeians of the Arab spring. Current Anthropology, 56(S11), S33-S43. https://doi.org/10.1086/681523
Bayat, A. (2013). Areas and Ideas. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 33(3), 260-263. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-2378040
Bayat, A. (2013). Egypt and Its Unsettled Islamism. In A. Bayat (Ed.), Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam (pp. 185-228). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199766062.003.0007