Dr. Tamara Sonn is the William R. Kenan Distinguished Professor of Humanities in the Department of Religious Studies at the College of William and Mary. Her books include
Interpreting Islam: Bandali Jawzi's Islamic Intellectual History (Oxford, 1996; winner of Choice Book of the Year award);
Comparing Religions through Law: Judaism and Islam (with J. Neusner; Routledge 1999; named "One of the Best Books of the 1990s" by the Journal of Law and Religion),
Islam: A Brief History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, an expanded and updated edition of
A Brief History of Islam, Blackwell 2004), and
The Sage Handbook of Islamic Studies (2010). Her most recent book is
The Religion Toolkit: A Complete Guide to Religious Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). She has contributed chapters and articles to numerous books and journals, as well as
Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, the
Encyclopedia of Women and Religion, and
Colliers Encyclopedia. She was senior editor of the
Oxford Dictionary of Islam (2003), and associate editor of
Oxford's encyclopedia The Islamic World Past and Present (2004). She is currently an editor of
Oxford Islamic Studies Online, and of
Oxford's Encyclopedia of the Islamic World (2009). As well, she is editor-in-chief of
Oxford Bibliographies Online:
Islamic Studies, and co-editor-in-chief of Wiley-Blackwell's fully online Religion Compass.