Nada Moumtaz received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research stands at the intersection of Islamic legal studies, the anthropology of Islam, and studies of capitalism, and spans the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries in the Levant. Throughout her work she addresses how, beginning in the nineteenth century, Islamic tradition has transformed while continuing to challenge and provide alternatives to dominant sensibilities, conceptions, and institutions of the modern world. She is currently finishing her book manuscript, tentatively entitled Reviving the Waqf: Property, Law, and Religion in Modern Beirut, where she examines the contemporary Islamic revival of a centuries-old charitable practice of pious endowment under global capitalism and a regime of modern nation-states. Moumtaz argues that these attempts to rekindle the practice of waqf reorder key concepts in the Islamic tradition, namely public benefit, family, and intent.
