Her research interests lie in exploring historically specific articulations of secular modernity in postcolonial societies, with particular attention to issues of subject formation, religiosity, embodiment, and gender. She also focuses on politics of religious liberty, particularly in relationship to religious minorities living in the Middle East. Professor Mahmood is the author of Politics and Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton University Press, 2005), and Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (edited with Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, and Judith Butler, University of California Press, 2009).