Mona Oraby is Assistant Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College. Her research sits at the intersection of law, religion, and politics, and focuses on group formation, membership, and belonging. Before joining Amherst, she was the Jerome Hall Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Law, Society, and Culture at Indiana University Maurer School of Law. Since 2017 she has served as editor of The Immanent Frame, the Social Science Research Council’s digital publication on secularism, religion, and the public sphere. She additionally serves as a steering committee member of the Secularism and Secularity Unit of the American Academy of Religion. She has been a fellow or visiting scholar at research centers in North America and Europe including the American Bar Foundation, the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry at The New School, the Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity, and the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities.

Her first book is tentatively entitled How Will We Know Who We Are? Devotion to the Administrative State. This project challenges long-held assumptions in the study of law and religion from the perspective of complainants who seek recognition, accommodation, protection, or exemption on the basis of their religious difference. The primary research on which the monograph is based–including interviews with attorneys and litigants as well as administrative jurisprudence–is previewed in two earlier papers: “Law, the State, and Public Order: Regulating Religion in Contemporary Egypt” in Law & Society Review and “Authorizing Religious Conversion in Administrative Courts: Law, Rights, and Secular Indeterminacy” in New Diversities.

She has co-authored, with Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, the first article on law and religion for the Annual Review of Law and Social Science. The article, entitled “Law and Religion: Reimagining the Entanglement of Two Universals,” will be published in October 2020.

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