Asma Afsaruddin

Asma Afsaruddin is the Class of 1950 Herman B Wells Endowed Professor and Professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures in the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She is also adjunct professor in the departments of Religious Studies and Gender Studies there. She is the author or editor of nine books, including Jihad: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2022); Contemporary Issues in Islam (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), the award-winning Striving in the Path of God: Jihad and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought (Oxford University Press, 2013) which has been translated into Indonesian, and the popular textbook The First Muslims: History and Memory (Oneworld Publications, 2008), which has been translated into Turkish, Bahasa Malay, and Bosnian. Her edited volume The Oxford Handbook of Islam and Women was recently published by Oxford University Press in 2023.

Professor Afsaruddin is a past member of the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Religion, was previously the Kraemer Middle East Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at the College of William and Mary (2012), and a visiting scholar at the Centre for Islamic Studies at the London School of Oriental and African Studies (2003). Her research has been funded, among others, by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the American Research Institute in Turkey, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which named her a Carnegie Scholar in 2005.  She was inducted into the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars in 2019 in recognition of her academic and professional accomplishments.