Robert Hefner

Robert W. Hefner is Professor and Director of Graduate Admissions at the Department of Anthropology, and Associate Director of the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs at Boston University, where he directs the program on Islam and civil society. Hefner has carried out research on religon and politics in Southeast Asia for the past twenty-eight years, and has conducted comparative research on Muslim culture and politics since the late-1980s. He is currently directing a project for the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs on "Madrasas, Modernity, and the Future of Muslim Higher Education." Earlier, he directed a multi-country, collaborative project on "Civil Democratic Islam, "also for the Pew Charitable Trusts, focusing on prospects and policies for civic pluralism and democracy in the Muslim world. During 1998-2001, Hefner directed a multisited, collaborative project for the Ford Foundation on "Southeast Asian Pluralisms: Social Resources for Civility and Participation in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia." Hefner has served as consultant on Muslim and Southeast Asian for government and no-governmental organizations, and is the invited editor for the sixth volume of the forthcoming New Cambridge Histoy of Islam, Muslims and Modernity: Society and Culture since 1800.

Hefner has published more than a dozen books, as well as several major policy reports. His most recent published works are Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (Princeton 2000) and, as editor, Remaking Muslim Politics: Pluralism, Contestation, Democratization (Princeton 2005). (2007)