Rüdiger Seesemann specializes in the study of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa and holds a Heisenberg-Professorship in Islamic Studies at the University of Bayreuth. He received his doctorate in Islamic Studies from the University of Mainz (Germany, 1993) and completed his Habilitation at the University of Bayreuth in 2005. From 2005 to 2011 he worked as Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Northwestern University Evanston. Seesemann has done extensive research in several West and East African countries (most notably Senegal, Sudan, and Kenya) on a variety of topics including Sufism, Islam and modernity, Islam and politics, Islamism, and Islamic education. He is the author of Ahmadu Bamba und die Entstehung der Muridiyya (1993), a monograph dealing with the founder of the Muridiyya, a Sufi order based in Senegal, and The Divine Flood: Ibrahim Niasse (1900-1975) and the Roots of a Twentieth-Century Sufi Revival (2011). Together with Roman Loimeier he has edited the volume The Global Worlds of the Swahili (2006). Seesemann is the editor of the book series “Islam in Africa” (E.J. Brill Publishers, Leiden) and deputy editor of the journal Islamic Africa. In Bayreuth, he serves as the Vice Dean of the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS).