Antonio Musto

I joined University of Minnesota in 2025 with a joint appointment in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and the Religious Studies program after receiving my PhD in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from New York University in 2024.My research centers on medieval Sufism in its textual, conceptual, historical, social, and political dimensions, with broader interests in religiosity in early Islam within the context of Late Antiquity, particularly the relationship between early Islamic renunciation and late antique Christian mysticism and asceticism. I am currently working on two books. The first is titled The Early Sufis of Hamadhān: Texts, Studies, and Translations (under review) and the second is tentatively titled  Origins of Sufism: Founding Myths and Their Afterlives. I also work extensively with unpublished manuscripts of early Sufi texts and am preparing several critical editions. In addition, I develop digital humanities tools that make advances in Arabic natural language processing and digital corpora accessible to non-technical researchers.