About Hamza M. ZAFER

ዘፈር | ظفر | ‎𐩧𐩰𐩼 | ਜ਼ਫਰ | ܙܦܪ

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Hamza M. Zafer (PhD, Cornell 2014) is a Senior Lecturer in African Studies at Princeton University and a former Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Languages at the University of Washington. Dr. Zafer’s research connects premodern Ethiopic, Arabic, and Indic writings to recover genealogies of thought marginalized in Western scholarship. He is currently writing Aksum and Medina: The African Quran, which tells the story of the early Muslims from the vantage point of an African empire and diaspora. He trains students in Classical Ethiopic (Ge’ez) and ancient Red Sea inscriptions.

Coming of age between Karachi, Islamabad, and New York, Dr. Zafer’s writing and teaching are informed by his experiences as an asylum seeker in post-9/11 America. His migrant pedagogy weaves together classical literatures of the Global South and the diasporic polyglossia of his home cities. He is the author of Ecumenical Community: Language and Politics of the Ummah (Brill, 2020) and several essays on the ancient Red Sea world including “The Quran as Red Sea Literature” (Edinburgh, 2026) and “The Abyssinian Matriarchs of Medina” (Cambridge, 2026).