Shahan Mufti

Shahan Mufti is an associate professor in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Richmond where he chairs the Department of Journalism. As a journalist he worked as a daily news reporter and magazine writer. Between 2007 and 2010, he was a foreign correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, reporting from South Asia while based in Islamabad, Pakistan. He later joined the team that launched GlobalPost.com, a Boston-based online platform for international news with reporters in more than fifty countries around the world. His work has also appeared in Harper’s, WIRED, The New York Times Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Columbia Journalism Review and many other publications.

Shahan's first book, The Faithful Scribe: A Story of Islam, Pakistan, Family, and War, was based on his years of reporting from Pakistan. It was published in the fall of 2013 by Other Press, and was named as one of that season's most anticipated debuts by Kirkus Reviews and the American Booksellers Association. His second book, American Caliph: The True Story of a Muslim Mystic, a Hollywood Epic, and the 1977 Siege of Washington, DC, was published by Farrar Straus and Giroux in the fall of 2022. It won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award and was a finalist for an Edgar Allan Poe Award. It was named one of the best nonfiction books of the year by Publishers Weekly.

A former Fulbright Scholar, Shahan holds a master’s degree in Journalism and Near Eastern Studies from New York University and an undergraduate degree in International Politics and Economics from Middlebury College.