July 2023: Associate Professor (Religion and Diaspora), School of Religion, Queen’s University. Kingston, ON, Canada. (Cross-affiliation with Cultural Studies Program and Department of Gender Studies).

July 2018-June 2023: Assistant Professor (Religion and Diaspora), School of Religion, Queen’s University. Kingston, ON, Canada. (Cross-affiliation with Cultural Studies Program and Department of Gender Studies).

July 2017-June 2018: Assistant Professor (Religious Studies) Philosophy and Religion Department, Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York.

Oct 2017-June 2018: Visiting Scholar, South Asia Program, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.

July 2015-June 2017: Visiting Assistant Professor (Religious Studies and History), Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Shobhana Xavier is a Tamil (Sri Lankan)-Canadian Religious Studies scholar at Queen’s University in Canada. She thinks and writes on contemporary Sufism across global and transnational contexts. Using ethnographic research she maps shrines, pilgrimages, rituals, praxis and gender dynamics. She has written on Canadian and American Sufism and Islam, especially as they intersect with popular spirituality. Currently she is working on her next book project, which is on Sufi Shrines in Contemporary Sri Lanka. She is also a co-host of New Books in Islamic Studies podcast.

Sufism in Canada: Weaving Islamic Practice and Contemporary Spirituality (University of British Columbia Press, 2025) co-edited with Geneviève Mercier-Dalphond.

The Dervishes of the North Rumi, Whirling and the Making of Sufism in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2023).

Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism: Bawa Muhaiyaddeen and Contemporary Shrine Cultures (Bloomsbury Press, 2018).

Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics and Popular Culture (Routledge 2017) with Meena Sharify-Funk and William Rory Dickson.