Formerly of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), Arvind Sharma is the Birks Professor of Comparative Religion in the School of Religious Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He has also taught in universities in Australia (Queensland, Sydney), the United States (Northeastern, Temple, Boston, Harvard) and India (Nalanda). He has also published extensively in the fields of Indology and comparative religion. He was instrumental, through three global conferences (2006, 2011, 2016), in facilitating the adoption of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the World's Religions.

Books authored by him include Gandhi: A Spiritual Biography, Hinduism and Its Sense of History, Religious Tolerance: A History and The Ruler's Gaze: A Study of British Rule over India from a Saidian Perspective. He is contributing editor of Our Religions: The Seven World Religions Introduced by Preeminent Scholars from Each Tradition, and series editor of the Encyclopedia of Indian Religions.