Mona Oraby (Ph.D., Northwestern University) is assistant professor of political science at Howard University and editor of The Immanent Frame (TIF), a digital publication of the Social Science Research Council that advances scholarly debate on secularism, religion, and the public sphere. She is the author of Devotion to the Administrative State: Religion and Social Order in Egypt (Princeton University Press, March 2024), which examines the claims-making practices of religious minorities who seek recognition from a state that ostensibly marginalizes them, highlighting the surprising implications of this desire for religion-state entanglement. A scholar with multidisciplinary and multimodal research interests, Oraby is also the coauthor of A Universe of Terms: Religion in Visual Metaphor (Indiana University Press, 2022), a graphic nonfiction book that by reimagining the relationship between word and image proposes an alternative form for scholarly communication.
I have been a fellow or visiting scholar at the American Bar Foundation (Chicago), the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry at the New School (New York), the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (Göttingen), and the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study (Bonn).
My editorial board memberships include Arab Law Quarterly and Middle East Law and Governance. I sit on the steering committee of the Secularism and Secularity Unit of the American Academy of Religion, and cochair the Law and Society Association’s Collaborative Research Network on Islamic Law and Society.
My editorship of TIF is supported by the Henry Luce Foundation and hosted by the SSRC’s Program on Religion and the Public Sphere. In this role, I convene established and emerging scholars to advance debate on religion and public life, broadly construed. I am passionate about purpose-driven digital content and work closely with authors to hone their ideas for broader audiences.
Before joining Howard University, I was assistant professor of law, jurisprudence, and social thought at Amherst College and the Jerome Hall Fellow in the Center for Law, Society & Culture at Indiana University Maurer School of Law.