Shiraz Hajiani is a scholar of religion and history with over a decade of experience in teaching and advising undergraduates, graduates and life-long learners, including at the University of Chicago and Harvard. He specialises in Islamic history and thought, Shiʿism, Ismaili studies and has regional expertise in the study of the Middle East, North Africa, Central and South Asia. His dissertation completed at Chicago (2019), contributes new approaches and readings of the history and thought of the early Nizari Ismailis and their polity in Iran (1090-1256 CE). His re-readings of the chronicles along with the newly discovered doctrinal treatises he has edited and translated reveal not only complex relations and tumultuous conflict between the Nizaris and their religio-political adversaries but also uncover long-standing factionalisms among the Nizaris which influenced their eschatological beliefs. Shiraz is preparing a monograph, The Life and Times of Our Master: A study of the biography of Ḥasan-i Ṣabbāḥ (Sar guẕasht-i Sayyidnā) and through lenses of Shiʿism and the Nizari polity, will examine Islamicate history of the early Middle Period. He is also completing an annotated translation, from Persian, of the lengthy account on the Fatimids (fl. 909-1171) and the Nizari polity in the Ilkhanid Mongol wazīr, Rashīd al-Dīn Faḍlallāh’s (d. 1318) Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh (Compendium of Histories).

In 2017, supported by the Fulbright Research Fellowship, Shiraz spent a year in Tajikistan and began his second research project, an ethnographic study of the histories of transmission of religious knowledge in Central Asia before during and after the Soviet period. Shiraz is a founder of the Ismaili Studies Conference. He holds a Masters of Theological Studies from the Harvard Divinity School, and a Master of Arts in History and a Doctorate in Islamic Studies  from the University of Chicago. Shiraz is the Alwaleed Bin Talal Postdoctoral Fellow in Islamic Studies hosted by the Center for the Study of World Religions. In Fall 2022, he will teach: Religion and Society in Islamicate History (900-1300 CE) from Shiʿi Centuries to Mongol Invasions.