Chad Haines

Chad Haines is the founding co-director of ASU's Center of Muslim Experience in the U.S. and an associate professor of Religious Studies. As a cultural anthropologist his interests intersect across a spectrum of humanistic concerns for marginal communities and building sustainable global futures founded in values of peace, community wellbeing, and lived ethics. As a convert to Islam, Haines straddles multiple worlds, interweaving diverse perspectives and experiences into his scholarship and teaching. He is a recognized scholar of modernity and Islam, Pakistan and South Asia, urbanism and belonging, as well as peace studies.

Haines is the author of Nation, Territory, and Globalization in Pakistan (Routledge 2012) and co-editor of three books on peace:  Women and Peace in the Islamic World: Gender, Agency, and Influence (I.B. Taurus 2015), People’s Peace: Prospects for a Human Future (Syracuse University Press 2019) and the forthcoming On Othering: Processes and Politics of Unpeace (Athabasca University Press, 2023). He is completing a second book monography, tentatively titled Muslim Pathways: Modernity, Informality and Everyday Ethics in the Alleys of Cairo, Islamabad, and Dubai (forthcoming). He has published a number of articles in leading journals and contributed chapters to several edited volumes. He serves on the advisory board of a number of international academic journals.

Haines’s research has been recognized and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the U.S. Department of State. He was a visiting scholar at Duke University, the University of Malaysia, the University of Science and Technology, Meghalaya (India), and worked with a number of other universities including the University of Punjab, Lahore, the International Islamic University of Islamabad, and Aligarh Muslim University.

At ASU, Haines is an affiliated faculty with the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict and the Center on the Future of War and is a Senior Global Futures Scholar with the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory. He is the coordinator of ASU’s Islamic Studies and Research Association and a regular contributor to the peace studies initiative. Before joining ASU, Haines was an assistant professor at American University in Cairo and worked at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as well as lectured at a number of other universities.

Haines's current research projects include: Islamophobia and hate where he has interviewed members of American extremist groups including the Oath Keepers and 3 Percenters; minority belonging in South Asia where he is conducting research on communities who are mapped outside the nation-states of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh; and reimagining peace as an everyday, lived ethics of community building.