Faculty
Asma Afsaruddin
Associate Professor
Department of Classics
Degrees
B.A., Oberlin College; M.A. and Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University
Research Profile
Asma Afsaruddin received her Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University in 1993 and is associate professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies and a fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. 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 Modern Islam (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) and the Bulletin of the Middle East Studies Association (Cambridge University Press). 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). 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 was previously 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 committees of Women's Global Initiative, Peace X Peace and 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. She has recently published a book, The First Muslims: History and Memory (OneWorld Publications 2007), which explains the impact of the earliest converts on the development of Islamic doctrine, law and ethics, and examines their status as moral exemplars for succeeding generations. (For more information, visit http://newsinfo.nd.edu/content.cfm?topicid=25467.) 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.
Contact Information
341 Decio Faculty Hall
631-8677