Dr. Celene Ibrahim
Dr. Celene Ibrahim is an internationally recognized specialist in religious studies with a focus on the formative period of Islamic history and on the histories of inter-religious encounter. She is the author of the award-winning monograph Women and Gender in the Qur'an published by Oxford University Press (2020). Her latest book, entitled Islam and Monotheism (2022), is in the Cambridge University Press Elements series. She is also the editor of the book One Nation, Indivisible: Seeking Liberty and Justice from the Pulpit to the Streets (Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2019).
Dr. Ibrahim's articles on Islamic family law and women's history have appeared in dozens of academic publications and she regularly serves as a reviewer for prominent presses and journals. Her current research interests include moral psychology and virtue ethics in early Islamic sources, depictions of men and boys in Qur'anic narratives, and portrayals of women figures in early Islamic biographical sources.
Dr. Ibrahim has a decade of experience teaching religious studies and is currently a faculty member in the Department of Religious Studies and Philosophy at Groton School. She serves as the Denominational Counselor for Muslim Students at Harvard Divinity School and previously served as the Muslim Chaplain at Tufts University (2014–2019). She was a Co-Director of the Center for Inter-religious and Communal Leadership Education at Hebrew College and Andover Newton (2014–2017) and taught religious studies courses at Merrimack College (2011–2014). She has offered courses and lectures at hundreds of institutions around the world, leads global study trips, and is regularly invited to international conferences as a trusted voice on Islamic intellectual history and religion in public life.
Ibrahim earned a doctorate in Arabic and Islamic Civilizations (2018) and a master's degree in Women's and Gender Studies (2014) from the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University. During this time, she received a Mellon Fellowship, multiple writing prizes, and was named a commencement speaker. Prior to her doctorate studies, she was named a Presidential Scholar and received a Masters of Divinity degree with a focus in Islam from Harvard University (2011) and was a Davis Scholar at Princeton University where she received a bachelor's degree with highest honors in Near Eastern Studies (2008). She is a proud graduate of the United World College of the American West (2002) where she first developed a passion for religious studies and international relations.
Read more about Dr. Ibrahim's life and work in the autobiographical introduction to One Nation, Indivisible: Seeking Liberty and Justice from the Pulpit to the Streets (click image).
