Fateh Saeidi is a historian of religion specializing in Islam and Sufism in Kurdistan, Iran, and the broader Middle East. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin from 2024 to 2026. His research examines the historical development of Islamic piety, early Sufi communities and intellectual traditions, and the relationships among religion, political authority, and identity.

He received his PhD in Iranian Studies from the University of Göttingen. His first book project, The Development of Renunciation and Classical Sufism in the Jibāl Region, reconstructs the formation of Sufism from the ninth through the twelfth centuries. Drawing on Arabic and Persian historical, biographical, and Sufi sources, the project investigates networks of religious knowledge, practices of renunciation, and the emergence of institutions and forms of spiritual authority that shaped the history of Islam in the region.

His broader research explores religion and politics in the modern Middle East, including the political uses of Islamic discourse and the ways nationalism and colonial forms of power have shaped Kurdish religious and cultural identities. Across his work, he brings the history of religion into conversation with questions of ethnicity, state power, and identity formation.