Aziza Shanazarova

Aziza Shanazarova is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Columbia University, where she specializes on the religious history of Islamic Central Asia and the broader Persianate world with an emphasis on the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. She holds a dual PhD in Religious Studies and Central Eurasian Studies completed at Indiana University-Bloomington in 2019. 

She is currently working on a book project entitled Female Religiosity and Gender History in Early Modern Central Asia: The Great Lady and Her Legacy, which is a study of female religious authority, spirituality and gender history based on the case of the 16th-century female Sufi master known as Aghā-yi Buzurg (The Great Lady).  

Before joining the Department of Religion, Aziza was a UCIS/REEES Postdoctoral Associate in the Humanities at the University of Pittsburgh.

In Paris, Aziza Shanazarova will conduct archival research at the Bibliothèque nationale de France on previously unstudied waqf deeds established by women in Islamic Central Asia from the 16th to 20th centuries, aiming to illuminate women’s roles in charity, religious, and educational institutions. Her work seeks to recover women’s legal and financial agency in shaping public life and offer a counter-narrative to restrictive contemporary gender ideologies.