Portrait by Kyle Myles

Mona Oraby is a scholar and writer interested in how communities make claims to difference, belonging, and the past. Her work examines the institutions, categories, and cultural practices through which such claims gain authority and meaning.

Her first book, Devotion to the Administrative State: Religion and Social Order in Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2024), centers on religious minorities’ pursuit of official recognition and the forms of communal life that recognition makes possible. She is also coauthor, with Emilie Flamme, of A Universe of Terms: Religion in Visual Metaphor (Indiana University Press, 2022), a collaborative experiment in illustrated scholarship that reconsiders familiar conceptual vocabularies in the study of religion.

From 2017 to 2025, Oraby edited The Immanent Frame, where she curated more than forty interdisciplinary and experimental projects on religion, secularism, and public life. Her editorial work brought scholars across the humanities and the social sciences into conversation around new and enduring questions, multiple forms of scholarly collaboration, and the possibilities of writing and thinking for broader publics.

Her current research examines African American engagements with African antiquity, especially in relation to travel, historical memory, and the Nile Valley. She is an associate professor of political science at Howard University.