He holds a PhD from Harvard University and his research specialises in devotion and aesthetics in the Indian Subcontinent and the Middle East. He is a Visiting Fellow at the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Reliving Karbala: Martyrdom in South Asian Memory (Oxford, 2006) and is currently working on a monograph about Josh Malihabadi and twentieth-century composite literary traditions. Professor Syed Akbar Hyder has been a Fellow of the Shīʿah Institute since October 2012.