Hasher Nisar

Hasher Nisar is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. He was also a Visiting Assistant in Research at Yale University for the 2024-2025 academic year. His research interests focus on examining the relationship between religion and politics in Muslim-majority countries. He is currently focused on exploring how the relationship between religious actors and the ruling elite has evolved across time and space, how colonialism transformed the religious sphere and its implications for the role of religion in the modern nation-state, and how official Islam shapes the views of citizens on religious matters and the state. He works with a variety of data sources, such as biographical dictionaries, sermons, fatwas, and surveys. He is particularly interested in LLMs for translation, feature extraction, and classification.

He also serves as a Research Associate for the US Muslims & Higher Education Research Lab at the University of Michigan. He has helped organize two convenings of higher education scholars, accreditation experts, policy actors, and founders and directors of US Muslim seminaries to discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with forming a higher education accreditation board for Muslim institutions. In addition to helping organize these gatherings, he has been conducting research on accreditation processes and individual Muslim seminaries in the United States.

Before starting his PhD at the University of Michigan, he worked as a consultant in the Middle East for two years where he served public sector institutions, followed by a year of Arabic study at the Qasid Institute in Amman, Jordan. He holds an M.Phil. in Islamic studies and history from the University of Oxford, and a B.A. in political science from Middlebury College. He is also a Truman and Marshall Scholar.

Working Papers:

1. "Believing Like A State? Official Islam & Public Opinion in Kyrgyzstan" (with Pauline Jones)
2. "A Mirror of the Times (Mirʾat al-Zamān): Rethinking Ulama-State Relations by Unfreezing History"

Work in Progress:

1. "Governing the Sacred: Religious Bureaucratization in Turkey, Egypt, & Pakistan"
2. "The Politial Economy of the American Mosque" (with Mostafa El Sharkawy)

Publications:

1. Nisar, Hasher, and Erik Bleich. 2020. “Group Status, Geographic Location, and the Tone of Media Coverage: Jews and Muslims in New York Times and Guardian Headlines, 1985–2014.” Comparative Migration Studies 8(1): 3. doi:10.1186/s40878-019-0153-3.
2. Bleich, Erik, Hasher Nisar, and Cara Vazquez. 2018. “Investigating Status Hierarchies with Media Analysis: Muslims, Jews, and Catholics in The New York Times and The Guardian Headlines, 1985-2014:” International Journal of Comparative Sociology: 1–19. doi:10.1177/0020715218775142.
3. Bleich, Erik, Hasher Nisar, and Rana Abdelhamid. 2016. “The Effect of Terrorist Events on Media Portrayals of Islam and Muslims: Evidence from New York Times Headlines, 1985–2013.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 39(7): 1109–27. doi:10.1080/01419870.2015.1103886.
4. Bleich, Erik, Hannah Stonebraker, Hasher Nisar, and Rana Abdelhamid. 2015. “Media Portrayals of Minorities: Muslims in British Newspaper Headlines, 2001–2012.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 41(6): 942–62. doi:10.1080/1369183X.2014.1002200.