Marion Holmes Katz is a Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYU, where she has been teaching since 2002. She received a BA from Yale and a PhD from the University of Chicago, and has taught at Franklin and Marshall College and Mount Holyoke College. Her research revolves around issues of Islamic law, ethics, gender, and ritual.  Her publications include Body of Text: The Emergence of the Sunni Law of Ritual Purity (SUNY Press, 2002), The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad (Routledge, 2007), Prayer in Islamic Thought and Practice (Cambridge, 2013) and Women in the Mosque (Columbia University Press, 2014). Her current book project uses the issue of domestic labor to examine the relationship between pre-modern Islamic law, ethics, and social custom.