About Jane Dammen McAuliffe
President and Professor of History Jane Dammen McAuliffe is an internationally known scholar of Islamic studies, the former Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgetown University, and a graduate of a women's college, Trinity University in Washington. D.C.
While at Georgetown, McAuliffe enhanced faculty recruitment and diversity, developed initiatives to foster more effective teaching and student advising, and expanded the number of undergraduate majors and minors in contemporary fields of inquiry. She has also built several graduate programs, including two new Ph.D. programs. She has successfully raised funds to build a performing arts center, to endow faculty positions, to create scholarships and to launch a science center.
She has long been committed to programs that support the notion that the best-educated and most-prepared students are those who experience on campus the same multicultural world that lies beyond. McAuliffe also believes that a strong grounding in the natural sciences is essential for addressing the pressing and complex issues facing contemporary society.
As a scholar, McAuliffe is an internationally respected specialist in Islamic studies whose expertise is in the Qur’an and its interpretations, early Islamic history, and the interrelationships between Islam and Christianity. In addition to publishing numerous books and journal articles, she recently completed the six-volume Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, the first reference work of its kind in a Western language.
McAuliffe received a Ph.D. (1984) and M.A. (1979) from the University of Toronto, and a B.A. from Trinity College (1968). Her scholarly work has been supported by several prestigious fellowships, including one from the Guggenheim Foundation, and she was recently elected to the American Philosophical Society.
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. She was Dean of Georgetown College from 1999 until this year and, before that, held faculty and administrative positions at Emory University and the University of Toronto. She is married to Dr. Dennis McAuliffe, a scholar of medieval Italian literature at Georgetown University. They are the parents of four children.
Jane Dammen McAuliffe