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. Her fields of specialization include pre-modern and modern Islamic thought, Islamic intellectual history, women and gender in Islam, and contemporary Islamic movements. In addition to over ninety journal articles and book chapters, 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 published by Oxford University Press in 2023 and is currently being translated into Arabic.
Professor Afsaruddin is a past member of the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Religion and 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.
