Bryn Mawr College

President Jane Dammen McAuliffe

Bryn Mawr College President Jane Dammen McAuliffe has served as Dean of Georgetown College at Georgetown University and Professor in the Departments of History and Arabic and Islamic Studies; Professor and Associate Dean at Emory University; and Chair of the Department for the Study of Religion and Professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. She received her BA in Philosophy and Classics from Trinity College, Washington, D.C. and her MA in religious studies and PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Toronto.

Dr. McAuliffe is an internationally known scholar of Islamic studies. Her numerous publications have focused primarily on the Qur’an and its interpretation, on early Islamic history and on the multiple relations between Islam and Christianity. She has written or edited four books, and recently completed the six-volume Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an (Brill, 2001-2006), the first such reference work in Western languages. Dr. McAuliffe’s work has been supported by prestigious fellowships, including those from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and Guggenheim Foundation. In 2007 she was elected to the American Philosophical Society, the oldest and most prestigious scholarly society in the United States. She is one of five American educators serving on the U.K./U.S. Study Group on Higher Education in a Globalized World, a panel created by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

She has long been active in various forms and forums of Muslim-Christian dialogue, on both the national and international levels. She has served on the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with Muslims as well as on the boards of the American Academy of Religion, of which she was president in 2004, the Association of Theological Schools, and Trinity University.