Valerie Hoffman, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, received her Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic studies from the University of Chicago in 1986. She teaches a number of courses on Islam and Muslim culture, including courses on the Qur'an, Muslim mystics and saints, women in Muslim societies, Islam and society in the modern Middle East and North Africa, and Muslim Christian interactions. Her areas of research specialization include Sufism in modern Egypt, Islamic gender ideology, Ibadi Islam in Oman and East Africa, Muslim women's religious lives, Islam in the Hadramawt region of Yemen, and contemporary Islamic movements.

She has done research in Egypt, Oman, Zanzibar and Yemen, and in 1999 she was invited to Iran to participate in a conference on Islamic philosophy. She has served on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Middle East Studies and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and also on the Board of Directors of the Middle East Studies Association of North America and chair of that association's Ethics Committee. This year she is a Carnegie scholar, working on a book entitled Islamic Sectarianism Reconsidered: Ibadi Islam in the Modern Age.

At the University of Illinois she is currently serving on the Executive Committee of the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Her publications include The Essentials of Ibadi Islam (Syracuse University Press, forthcoming); Sufism, Mystics, and Saints in Modern Egypt (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1995); “Ibadi Muslim Scholars and the Confrontation with Sunni Islam in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Zanzibar.” Bulletin of the Royal Institute of Inter-Faith Studies 7, 1 (Spring-Summer 2005): 91-118; “Muslim-Christian Encounters in late Nineteenth-Century Zanzibar,” MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 5 (Fall 2005); “Women, Gender and Sufi Orders, Practices: Egypt,” pp. 762-764, in Family, Law and Politics: Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, edited by Suad Joseph (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2005); “The Articulation of Ibadi Identity in Modern Oman and Zanzibar,” Muslim World 14, 2 (April 2004): 201-216; “Contending Legitimacies: Muslim Perspectives on Human Rights,” in A Force Profonde: The Power, Politics, and Prospects of Human Rights, ed. Edward Kolodziej (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp. 45-68; and “Annihilation in the Messenger of God: Development of a Sufi Practice,” in International Journal of Middle East Studies 31, 3 (August 1999): 351-369.

In November 2008, Prof. Hoffman was interviewed for "Matters of Faith," a program on Ebru, a Turkish-American TV station, on the topic of Sufism. The two episodes on which she appeared are available here (click on Season 1: Episode 1 and Season 1: Episode 2 on the bottom of the page to access the video).

Curriculum Vitae (Word)

Courses Taught Recently
RLST 213 Introduction to Islam-ACP
RLST 214 Introduction to Islam
RLST 223 Qur'an: Structure and Exegesis
RLST 260 Mystics and Saints in Islam
RLST/ANTH/GWS 403/HIST 434 Women in Muslim Societies
RLST/PS 408 Islam in Modern Society
RLST 410 Islam in Egypt (Study Abroad Course)
RLST 481 Rethinking Muslim Ethics in the Global Age
RLST 482 Muslim-Christian Interactions
RLST 494 Islam in East Africa
RLST 514 Islamic Theology