Professor Hoda Mahmoudi holds The Bahá’í Chair for World Peace at the University of Maryland, College Park. Before joining the University faculty, she served as the coordinator of the Research Department at the Bahá’í World Centre in Haifa, Israel. Prior to that, she was Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Northeastern Illinois University, where she was also a faculty member in the Department of Sociology. Professor Mahmoudi has numerous publications, including co-editing Systemic Racism in America: Sociological Theory, Education Inequality, and Social Change (Routledge, 2022), co-editing Women and Inequality in a Changing World: Exploring New Paradigms for Peace (Routledge, 2024).