Named one of Brooklyn Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture” in 2016, Zaheer Ali is the Oral Historian at Brooklyn Historical Society, a nationally recognized urban history center founded in 1863. As Brooklyn Historical Society’s Oral Historian, he records, collects, archives, and curates the lived histories, testimonies, memoirs, and narrations of Brooklynites from all walks of life.
Previously, he served under the direction of the late Manning Marable, as project manager and senior researcher of the Malcolm X Project (MXP) at Columbia University, and contributed as a lead researcher for Marable’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (2011).
He is currently an adjunct lecturer at New York University’s School of Professional Studies, where he teaches A