Tamara Sonn is Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in the History of Islam and the former director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. Her most recent books include Overcoming Orientalism: Essays in Honor of John L. Esposito (Oxford, 2021), Islam and Democracy After the Arab Spring (with John L. Esposito and John O. Voll; Oxford, 2016), Islam: History, Religion, and Politics (Wiley Blackwell, 2016), and Is Islam an Enemy of the West? (Polity, 2016).
She has published over 100 chapters and articles, and her works have been translated into Arabic, Bengali, German, Portuguese, Korean, and Russian. She has lectured in North America, Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright, and the U.S. Department of State, among others. She is Founding Editor-In-Chief of Oxford Bibliographies Online–Islamic Studies and of Wiley-Blackwell’s online journal of Religious Studies Religion Compass.
She served as Senior Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Islam (2003), and Associate Editor of Oxford’s Encyclopedia of the Islamic World Past and Present (2004). She is Senior Editor of Oxford Islamic Studies Online, and of Oxford’s Encyclopedia of the Islamic World, as well as Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion.