Carl W. Ernst is an academic specialist in Islamic studies, with a focus on West and South Asia. He has received research fellowships from the Fulbright program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and he has been elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His research, based on the study of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, has been mainly devoted to the study of three areas: general and critical issues of Islamic studies, premodern and contemporary Sufism, and Indo-Muslim culture. Recent publications include I Cannot Write My Life: Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar ibn Said’s America, co-authored with Mbaye Lo (UNC Press, 2023), winner of the 2024 Award for Excellence in Religious Studies (Textual Studies) from the American Academy of Religion; and Breathtaking Revelations: The Science of Breath, from the Fifty Kamarupa Verses to Hazrat Inayat Khan, co-authored with Patrick d’Silva (Suluk Press, 2024). Another recent book, which won the inaugural Global Humanities Translation Prize from the Buffet Institute, is a translation from the Arabic, Hallaj: Poems of a Sufi Martyr (Northwestern University Press, 2018).
Professor Ernst studied comparative religion at Stanford University (A.B. 1973) and Harvard University (Ph.D. 1981). He has taught at Pomona College (1981-1992) and has been on the faculty of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1992-2022), where he is now William R. Kenan, Jr., Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies Emeritus.
