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Asma T. Uddin is a professor, author, and lawyer specializing in religious liberty. Her recent major publications include When Islam Is Not a Religion (2019); The Politics of Vulnerability (2021); and multiple scholarly articles utilizing social science theories to map depolarization strategies for the U.S. Supreme Court.
Uddin is currently a Research Fellow at Georgetown University’s law school. Previously, she was Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at the Catholic University of America, where she taught International Human Rights; Gender, Law, and Policy; and the religious liberty clinic. She has also taught the religious liberty clinic at Harvard Law School. After graduating from the University of Chicago Law School, Uddin served as Legal Counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. While there, she helped litigate religious liberty cases in both international and domestic tribunals, including the U.S. Supreme Court.
Uddin is also a Fellow with the Freedom Forum Institute and the Aspen Institute's Religion & Society Program in Washington, D.C. At Aspen, she created a data-based approach to reducing Muslim-Christian polarizationin the U.S. Her work on depolarization has been supported by the Fetzer Institute, Pew Charitable Trusts, M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, and the Templeton Religion Trust.
Uddin served two terms as an expert advisor on religious liberty to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), was a term-member of the Council on Foreign Relations, has held fellowships at Harvard, Georgetown, and UCLA, and currently sits on the Board of Advisors for Notre Dame University's Religious Liberty Initiative.
Uddin’s extensive public writings on religion, politics, and polarization have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, USA Today, U.S News & World Report, Al Jazeera America, Flipboard, Refinery29, Teen Vogue, and numerous other outlets. In 2022, Deseret Magazine named Uddin a "new reformer": one of 20 faith leaders who "are challenging the conservative movement to change."
From 2009 to 2016, Uddin founded and edited a web magazine, altMuslimah, which covered a wide range of issues at the intersection of gender and Islam. The web magazine had a content partnership with the Washington Post, hosted multiple conferences at Princeton University, and was studied in journalism workshops abroad. Uddin has also advised media projects on American Muslims, including as Executive Producer for the Emmy and Peabody nominated docu-series, The Secret Life of Muslims.
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