Aijaz is a leading Marxist philosopher and cultural theorist. He is the author of In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literature (1992), Lineages of the Present: Ideological and Political Genealogies of Contemporary South Asia (2001), and Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Imperialism of Our Time (2004). He has been a Professorial Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, the Rajiv Gandhi Chair at Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan Chair at Jamia Millia University, and is currently the Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California (Irvine).