Elora Shehabuddin

Title: 
Professor and Director, Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies
Bio: 

Elora Shehabuddin is Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and Global Studies and Director, Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies. She was Professor of Transnational Asian Studies and Core Faculty in the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University prior to moving to Berkeley in 2022. She was Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Political Science at UC Irvine in 1999–2001. She received her A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard University and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University.

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 a guest co-editor of a special issue of Feminist Economics on “Gender and Economics in Muslim Communities.” She currently serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Bangladesh Studies and a new Cambridge University Press book series titled "Muslim South Asia." She is Associate Editor (Central and South Asia) of the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures.

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.

Professor Shehabuddin's 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 from the Association for Asian Studies. Her doctoral dissertation was awarded the American Political Science Association’s 2002 Aaron Wildavsky Dissertation Award for best dissertation in Religion and Politics.

Research interests: 
  • transnational feminism
  • history and politics of feminist movements
  • activisms
  • critical approaches to development
  • political economy
  • South Asia, Middle East, Global South, US
  • Islam
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