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 Ethiopian, Arabian, and Indian writings to recover genealogies of thought marginalized in Western scholarship. He is currently writing Migration to Abyssinia: The African Quran, which tells the story of the first African translation of the Quran and its thousand year making. At Princeton, he teaches Classical Ethiopic (Ge’ez) and seminars on African literary history. He is the author of Ecumenical Community: Language and Politics of the Ummah (Brill, 2020) and several essays on the ancient Red Sea including “The Quran as Red Sea Literature” (Edinburgh, 2026) and “The Abyssinian Matriarchs of Medina” (Cambridge, 2026).