Elora Shehabuddin

Elora Shehabuddin is Professor of Transnational Asian Studies and Core Faculty in the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She received her A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard University and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University.

Professor Shehabuddin is the author of Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism(University of California Press, 2021), Reshaping the Holy: Democracy, Development, and Muslim Women in Bangladesh(Columbia University Press, 2008), and Empowering Rural Women: The Impact of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh (Grameen Bank, 1992). She has published articles in Modern Asian StudiesSigns: Journal of Women in Culture and SocietyJournal of Women's HistorySüdasien-Chronik [South Asia Chronicle], Journal of Bangladesh Studies, and Asian Survey, as well as chapters in numerous edited volumes. She co-edited a special issue of Feminist Economics on “Gender and Economics in Muslim Communities.” 

Professor Shehabuddin has received many fellowships, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the Social Science Research Council, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the U.S. Institute of Peace. She has been selected as a Carnegie Scholar and as a Research Associate in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at the Divinity School at Harvard University. Her doctoral dissertation was awarded the American Political Science Association’s Aaron Wildavsky Dissertation Award for best dissertation in Religion and Politics.

Professor Shehabuddin currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Bangladesh Studies, as an Associate Editor of the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures (Brill), on the Advisory Committee of the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School, and as an elected member of the South Asia Council in the Association for Asian Studies.