Asma Afsaruddin, Associate Professor
Email address:
afsaruddin.1@nd.edu
Compass Articles by this Author
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Views of Jihad Throughout History
University of Notre Dame (Vol. 1, November 2006)
Academic History
Asma Afsaruddin is associate professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Notre Dame and previously taught at Harvard University. In fall 2003, she was a visiting scholar at the Centre for Islamic Studies at the School for Oriental and African Studies, London, UK, and has been a fellow at the American Research Center of Egypt in Cairo and the American Research Institute of Turkey in Istanbul. Afsaruddin is chair of the Board of Directors of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, and serves on the advisory board of Karamah, a human and women's rights organization, and on the advisory committee of the Muslim World Initiative of the United States Institute of Peace, all based in Washington, D.C. She frequently consults with US governmental and private agencies on contemporary Islamic movements, inter-faith, and gender issues. Previously, she served on the editorial board of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Medieval Islamic Civilization (2006), the Routledge Encyclopedia of the Qur'an, and the Oxford Dictionary of Islam (2002).
Research Interests
Her fields of specialization are the religious and political thought of Islam, Qur'an and hadith studies, Islamic intellectual history, and gender. She is the author of Excellence and Precedence: Medieval Islamic Discourse on Legitimate Leadership (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002), the editor of Hermaneutics and Honor: Negotiation of Female "Public" Space in Islamic/ate Societies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1999), and co-editor (with Mathias Zahniser) of Humanism, Culture, and Language in the Near East : Essays in Honor of Georg Krotkoff (Eisenbrauns: Winona Lake, Ind., 1997). She has also written over fifty research articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries on various aspects of Islamic thought and has lectured widely in the US, Europe, and the Middle East. Afsaruddin is currently serving on the editorial board of the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) and the Bulletin of the Middle East Studies Association (Cambridge University Press). Among her current research projects is a specially commissioned monograph on the history of early Muslims (forthcoming from Oxford: OneWorld Publishers, 2007) and a book manuscript about competing perspectives on jihad and martyrdom in pre-modern and modern Islamic thought.
Prizes and Awards
Among others, her research has won funding from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and she was named a Carnegie Scholar for 2005 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
