Dr. Shatha Almutawa is Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at Willamette University. She is a scholar of Islam and Judaism whose research has focused on the medieval period. She has focused on intellectual exchange between Islam and other religions, and her work employs literary, philosophical, and historical methods. Dr. Almutawa received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2013. Her dissertation, “Imaginative Cultures and Historic Transformations: Narrative in Rasa’il Ikhwan Al-Safa,” examined philosophical allegories, parables, and tales written in tenth-century Iraq.

Dr. Almutawa also works on the contemporary period. Her report on women’s rights in the United Arab Emirates was published in Women’s Rights in the Middle East and North Africa: Citizenship and Justice (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). She recently received grants from the Dr. Philip M. Kayal Fund for Arab American Research and the American Academy of Religion to work on a new project on gender and secularism in contemporary Turkey.

From 2009 to 2013 she was editor of Sightings, which is published by the Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion, and in 2014 and 2015 she served as an editor of Perspectives on History published by the American Historical Association. She has taught at Qatar University, where she was an assistant professor in the history department, Bradley University, where she was a visiting professor, as well as Cornell College, Lake Forest College and the University of Chicago. She served as Iraq Country Specialist for Amnesty International USA between 2009 and 2011.

At Willamette, she teaches Introduction to Islam; Religion, Peace, and Violence; Muslim and Jewish Philosophy; Women in Islam; and Introduction to the Qur'an.

To listen to the pronunciation of her name, click here.