Brannon Ingram is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Northwestern University. Broadly, his research examines debates about Sufism, religious authority and Muslim public life in in modern South Asia and South Africa. His peer-reviewed articles are published or forthcoming from The Muslim World, Modern Asian Studies, Critical Research on Religion, and South Asia: The Journal of South Asian Studies. In May 2014, he convened an interdisciplinary conference here at Northwestern titled, "Imagining the Public in Colonial India," with support from the Buffett Center's Equality, Development and Globalization Studies (EDGS) grant. The conference is the basis for a forthcoming special issue of the journal South Asia in September 2015. The paper he will be giving is a co-authored introduction to that special issue, titled "Imagining the Public in Modern India: Liberalism, Law, Religion."