Basarudin received her Ph.D. in Women’s Studies at UCLA in 2009. Her work explores feminist and religious knowledge production through hermeneutic projects and memory work in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. She recently completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship on The Future for Minority Studies Research Project in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Syracuse University. She has served as a Research Fellow and Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Malaysian and International Studies and as a Research Fellow at the American University of Cairo. She is also a recipient of awards from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), and the National Science Foundation (NSF), among others. Some of her recent publications include “In Search of Faithful Citizens in Postcolonial Malaysia: Islamic Ethics, Muslim Activism, and Feminist Politics” in Women and Islam (forthcoming), “Fatima Mernissi” in Twentieth-Century Arab Writers (2009), and “Our Memories of Islam: Pakistani, Malaysian, and Palestinian Women (Re) imagine Muslim and (Re) define Faith” in Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith, and Sexuality (2006). She received a CSW Paula Stone Research Fellowship in 2006.

Basarudin is working on a book manuscript based on her dissertation, titled “Humanizing the Sacred: Gender Justice, Islamic Reformation, and Ethical Selves.” The manuscript explores Muslim women's knowledge production and faith-centered activism in a Sunni Muslim community in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.