Keynote Speaker

Prof. Lemons is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (2010). Her research focuses on Islamic family law adjudication in India—a subject with implications for understanding Muslim gender and kin relations, secularism, minority politics, and legal pluralism.

Her first book, Divorcing Traditions: Islamic Marriage Law and the Making of Indian Secularism (Cornell University Press, 2019), repositions our understanding of the relationship between religious and secular law in postcolonial contexts by analyzing divorce and marital disputes in four non-state Islamic institutions in Delhi.

She is currently working on two research projects. The first, Traveling for Justice, builds on her research on Islamic law in India and explores how Islamic legal knowledge travels transnationally. The second, Adjacent to the State, is an ethnographic and archival study of why Muslims bring disputes to Ontario’s sharia courts, and how the Islamic judges (qazis) in these courts adjudicate them.