Erin Pettigrew is an Associate Professor of History and Arab Crossroads Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi. She is a historian of modern Africa, with a research focus on nineteenth and twentieth-century West Africa and histories of Islam, race, and healing in colonial and postcolonial contexts.

Dr. Pettigrew's book, To Invoke the Invisible in the Sahara: Islam, Spiritual Mediation, and Social Change (Cambridge University Press, 2023), examines the cultural history of Muslim spiritual mediators in the Saharan West. Her second major research book project, Cries of the Oppressed: Leftists, Arab Nationalism, and National Identity in Early Post-Independence Mauritania, presents the Mauritanian movement as a counter-narrative to histories of Islamic reform movements in West Africa in the second half of the twentieth century.

She has published in The Journal of African History, Mediterranean Politics, Islamic Africa, and the collected volume Politiques de la culture et cultures du politique dans l’ouest saharien. She has also recently co-edited a special issue of L'Ouest saharien entitled Femmes du Sahara-Sahel : transformations sociales et conditions de vie (2022).