Mark Woodward is associate professor of religious studies and is also affiliated with the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University. In 2008, he was visiting associatepProfessor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He has a bachelor's and master's degrees, and a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on Islam, religion-state-society relations and religion and conflict in Southeast Asia. He has also conducted research on Islam, politics in West Africa (Niger and Nigeria) and in The United Kingdom. He is author of "Islam in Java. Normative Piety and Mysticism in the Sultanate of Yogyakarta, Defenders of Reason in Islam" (1989) and "Java, Indonesia and Islam" (2010) co-author (with Richard Martin and Dwi Atmaja) of "Defenders of Reason in Islam. Mutazilism from Medieval School to Modern Symbol" (1997), editor of "Towards a New Paradigm: Intellectual Developments in Indonesian Islam" (1996) and co-editor (with Bianca Smith) of "Gender and Power in Indonesian Islam: Leaders, Feminists, Sufis and Pesantren Selves" (2013). He has published more than 50 scholarly articles in the U.S., Europe, Indonesia and Singapore, many co-authored with Southeast Asian scholars. He is currently directing a trans-disciplinary, multi-country project on counter-radical Muslim discourse.