Hilary Kalmbach is the Sir Christopher Cox Junior Fellow at New College, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on changing structures of Islamic authority, knowledge, and education in the modern Middle East. An article based on her first experiences with female Islamic authority, during a year-long Fulbright Fellowship in Damascus, Syria, won the 2007 BRISMES Graduate Article Prize. She is the co-editor of Women, Leadership and Mosques (Brill 2012).

Hilary's current project examines the place of Cairo's Dar al-'Ulum teacher training college in the sociocultural, linguistic, and religious changes of the first half of the twentieth century, while her next project looks at twentieth-century grassroots Islamic organizations in several Middle Eastern countries, including Egypt and Syria