Dr. Asma Afsaruddin ( .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) ) received her Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University in 1993 and is currently associate professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. She previously taught at the Johns Hopkins and Harvard universities. Her fields of specialization are the religious and political thought of Islam, Qur’an and hadith studies, and Islamic intellectual history. Professor Afsaruddin is the author of Excellence and Precedence: Medieval Islamic Discourse on Legitimate Leadership (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002); the editor of Hermeneutics and Honor :Negotiation of Female “Public” Space in Islamic/ate Societies (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University, 1999); and co-editor of Humanism, Culture, and Language in the Near East: Studies in Honor of Georg Krotkoff (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1997). Her articles and reviews have been published in numerous scholarly journals and she has lectured widely in this country and abroad on various aspects of Islamic thought. Afsaruddin is the recipient of a research grant from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation for 2003-04. She is currently serving on the editorial boards of the Encyclopedia of Medieval Islamic Civilization (Routledge Press, forthcoming), and the Bulletin of the Middle East Studies Association and is a member of the advisory board of Karamah, a womens and human rights organization based in Washington, D.C.