Ellen McLarney is Associate Professor of Arabic and Islamic Culture at Duke University in the Asian and Middle East Studies Department. Her first book Soft Force: Women in Egypt's Islamic Awakening (2015) was published by Princeton University Press in their Studies in Muslim Politics series. The book explored Muslim women's writings on issues of women's knowledge, leadership, work, and reproduction in Islam. Her second book Black Arts, Black Muslims: Islam in the Black Freedom Struggle will be published by Columbia University Press in their Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past/Present/Future series in partnership with Howard University. She curated a project on “Muslims in America” funded by the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art through their Building Bridges initiative, featuring the work of Muslim American artists, musicians, poets, and filmmakers from the African diaspora. She is also the recipient of a Fulbright Scholar award for a project on Muslims in Latin America with a specific focus on Argentina where she worked in conjunction with Diversa: Red de Estudios de la Diversidad Religiosa en Argentina (Network of Studies of Religious Diversity in Argentina). She is currently working on another project Women Writing Jihad: The Struggle of the Self and Pen about women's intellectual jihad and ijtihad.
