Professor Masooda Bano
DPhil in International Development
Senior Golding Research Fellow
Much of my academic career has been at the University of Oxford. I joined Oxford in 2001 as a DPhil student and have remained in the same department since. I teach on the MPhil in Development Studies and supervise doctoral students. My principal focus, however, is on directing large, multi-country research programmes, typically spanning five to seven years. Before coming to Oxford, I completed an MPhil in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge.
My primary area of interest lies in understanding the role of ideas and beliefs in shaping development processes, particularly how they evolve and interact with changing social contexts. My research focuses on the dynamic interplay between material and psycho-social incentives and how this relationship influences individual choices and collective development outcomes. I build large-scale comparative studies that combine ethnographic and survey data.
I have held a number of prestigious fellowships and research grants. Between 2013 and 2019, I led a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant project titled Changing Structures of Islamic Authority and Consequences for Social Change – A Transnational Review (CSIA). The project mapped contemporary Islamic scholarly debates across leading global platforms to assess their responsiveness to changing social contexts. I currently hold an ERC Advanced Grant for the project Choosing Islamic Conservatism: Muslim Youth in Europe and the UK and the Question of Social Cohesion. Using a multidisciplinary approach, this project examines the appeal of prominent Islamic movements to young Muslims in the UK, France, Germany, Austria, and Bosnia. It is the first comparative study to analyse institutional change within these movements across European contexts.
In addition to this work, I have published extensively on women in Islam and have recently edited The Cambridge Companion to Women and Islam. I have also contributed to scholarship on aid effectiveness, focusing on how aid influences trust within voluntary organisations and on the persistent failure of aid interventions to resolve the learning crisis in the developing world.
(2025) The Cambridge Companion to Women and Islam . (ed), New York: Cambridge University Press.
(2020) The Revival of Islamic Rationalism: Logic, Metaphysics and Mysticism in Modern Muslim Societies . New York: Cambridge University Press
(2017) Female Islamic Education Movements: The Re-Democratisation of Islamic Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(2012) The Rational Believer: Choices and Decisions in the Madrasas of Pakistan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
(2012) Breakdown in Pakistan: How Aid is Eroding Institutions for Collective Action . Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.