Noorzehra Zaidi

Dr. Noor Zaidi is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, focusing on the Middle East and South Asia. She specializes in the history of gender, sectarianism, and Shi’a Islam in national and transnational spaces. Her research explores “sites of sectarianization” through the 20th century, tracing the development and evolution of pilgrimage to two female shrines in Syria and Pakistan and prisons in Iraq as sites of memory and identity construction. Based on oral interviews, fieldwork and archival research in Syria, Pakistan, and Iraq, Prof. Zaidi’s work explores the physical and imaginative spaces in which identity is made and contested and shows how transnational narratives become embedded in local contexts.