Policy Scholarship Recipients

Name: Hasher Nisar

Recipient Year: 2025

Major: Political Science

Description: Hasher Nisar is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. He was also a Visiting Assistant in Research at Yale University for the 2024-2025 academic year. His research interests focus on examining the relationship between religion and politics in Muslim-majority countries. He is currently focused on exploring how the relationship between religious actors and the ruling elite has evolved across time and space, how colonialism transformed the religious sphere and its implications for the role of religion in the modern nation-state, and how official Islam shapes the views of citizens on religious matters. He works with a variety of data sources, such as biographical dictionaries, sermons, and surveys. Before Michigan, he worked as a consultant in the Middle East for two years, followed by a year of Arabic study at Qasid in Jordan. He holds an MPhil in Islamic studies and history from the University of Oxford and a BA in political science from Middlebury College.

School Name: University of Michigan

Sponsor: Dr. Agha Saeed Memorial Scholarship

LinkedIn Profile: www.linkedin.com/in/hasher-nisar

Recipient Type: Scholarship Recipient