Linell Cady is Professor of religious studies and the founding Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University. Trained in modern western religious thought, her work focuses on the relationship of religion and the public/private boundary, with primary attention to the American context. Topics of particular interest include the construction of the modern category of religion and its interface with understandings of the secular and the public and the contested role of religion in public life. She is the author of Religion, Theology and American Public Life (1993) , and co–editor of Religious Studies, Theology, and the University: Conflicting Maps, Changing Terrain (2002), Religion and Conflict in South and Southeast Asia: Disrupting Violence (2007), Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age (2010), and Religion, the Secular, and the Politics of Sexual Difference (2013).