Prof. Sheikh is an Assitant Professor with SPIRE at the University of Keele in the United Kingdom.  He is currently serving as a Visiting Fellow with the Center for Asian Democracy at the Univeristy of Louisville.  Prof. Sheikh earned his MA in International Relations from the University of Durham (UK) and is enrolled in the Ph.D program in International Relations at the University of Cambridge (UK).  He has also held fellowships at Harvard University as well as Hosei University in Tokyo, Japan.  Prof. Sheikh has authored two books, The New Politics of Islam: Pan-Islamic Foreign Policy in a World of States (2207) and Saudi State, Wahabi World: The Globalization of Muslim Radicalism (2009).

The post-9/11 period has seen a renaissance in political Islamology, thought the cumulative knowledge is yet to usher into a clear understanding of the interrelationship between variant forms of political Islam on the one hnad, and Islam and non-Islam on the other.  This talk will explore the political and intellectual history of Islamism, seek to provide an overarching schematic, and integrate scholarly models into a new taxonomy.  Case studies will include Pakistan and Indonesia.