Rubina Salikuddin is currently an Assistant Professor at Bryn Mawr College’s Program in Middle Eastern, Central Asian, & North African Studies. She teaches courses on the medieval, early modern, and modern history of the Middle East and Central Asia, as well as more interdisciplinary courses on the Middle East generally
Rubina is a historian of late medieval and early modern Iran and Central Asia; her work centers on figuring out what life looked like for people living in this period, how they saw their place in both their communities and in the larger world, and how they constructed an ideal of a life properly lived. She focuses on religious and cultural production in Iran and Central Asia in the 14th to 16th centuries.
Rubina’s current book project focuses on medieval notions of what is sacred. It argues that communities in 15th- and 16th-century Iran and Central Asia constructed the sacred around their own local and regional contexts, particularly through pilgrimage to local shrines of the holy dead.