Leila Ahmed

Leila Ahmed is the Victor S. Thomas Professor at the Harvard Divinity School. Before that, she was the first person to hold the Women’s Studies in Religion professorship, established in 1999. She has also taught women’s studies and Near Eastern studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where at different times, she directed both the women’s studies program and the Near Eastern studies programs. She received her undergraduate and graduate education at Cambridge University, working first on British ideas of the Middle East. Her next project was an ambitious and subtle history of women and gender in the Muslim world, a text that changed the field of Middle East women’s studies. Her first two books, reflecting this work, were Edward William Lane: A Study of His Life and Work and of British Ideas of the Middle East in the Nineteenth Century and Women and Gender in Islam: The Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. She has also published many well known articles, among them “Arab Culture and Writing Women’s Bodies” and “Between Two Worlds: The Formation of a Turn of the Century Egyptian Feminist.” Her current research and writing centers on Islam in America and issues of women and gender. Border Passage, a memoir of her journey from Cairo to the U.S. was published in 1999.