Asma Afsaruddin is Professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures in the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author or editor of eight books, including her recently published Jihad: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2022); Contemporary Issues in Islam (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), the award-winning Striving in the Path of God: Jihad and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought (Oxford University Press, 2013), and The First Muslims: History and Memory (Oneworld, 2008).

Professor Afsaruddin is a past member of the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Religion and was previously the Kraemer Middle East Distinguished Scholar-in- Residence at the College of William and Mary (2012) and a visiting scholar at the Centre for Islamic Studies at the London School of Oriental and African Studies (2003).  Her research has been funded, among others, by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the American Research Institute in Turkey.  She was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2005 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and was inducted into the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars in 2019 in recognition of her academic and professional accomplishments.