Research Bio

Elora Shehabuddin is Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and Global Studies. She 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 Meridians, Signs, Journal of Women's History, History of the Present, Economic & Political Weekly, Modern Asian Studies, Südasien-Chronik [South Asia Chronicle], Journal of Bangladesh Studies, and Asian Survey, as well as chapters in numerous edited volumes. She was Associate Editor (Central and South Asia) of the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures (Brill) for many years and a guest co-editor of a special issue of Feminist Economics on “Gender and Economics in Muslim Communities” She is currently Co-Editor of the Journal of Bangladesh Studies (Brill) and on the editorial board of a Cambridge University Press book series titled “Muslim South Asia.” 

Professor Shehabuddin has received several 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 a Research Associate in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at the Divinity School at Harvard University and a Carnegie Scholar.

Her book Sisters in the Mirror was selected as a 2022 Choice Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association and awarded the 2023 Coomaraswamy Book Prize by the Association for Asian Studies. Her doctoral dissertation was awarded the American Political Science Association’s Aaron Wildavsky Dissertation Award for best dissertation in Religion and Politics. She received her A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard University and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University.

Research Expertise and Interest

transnational feminism, history and politics of feminist movement, activism, left-wing politics in the Global South, critical approaches to development, political economy, South Asia, Middle East, Global South, United States