Mona Hassan

Mona Hassan is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies & History at Duke University in the departments of History and Religious Studies.  She obtained her Ph.D. from Princeton University and specializes in global Islamic history.  Dr. Hassan’s research and publications analyze the intersections of religion, culture, gender, and politics.  Her first book Longing for the Lost Caliphate: A Transregional History (Princeton University Press, 2017) received the American Academy of Religion's 2017 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the category of Historical Studies.  It examines Muslim engagement with the notion of an Islamic caliphate following its loss in the thirteenth and twentieth centuries and explores how poignant memories of the lost caliphate have percolated through Muslim culture, law, and politics across Afro-Eurasia.  She has also researched and published on the shifting contours of women’s Islamic legal scholarship from the emergence of the Muslim community in the seventh century to the secular interventions of modern nation-states in the present. Some of her articles in this vein reinterpret how the history of Turkish secularism continues to affect the spatial mapping and contestation of gendered religious domains in the modern Republic of Turkey.