Public Scholarship

I am committed to reimagining how capacious academic scholarship can be in addressing contemporary social issues. In 2024, my co-editor Juliane Hammer and I published an open-access volume through Boston University Libraries OpenBU platform called Sexual Violence in Muslim Communities: Towards Awareness and Accountability. It brings together an international slate of activists, professionals, and junior and senior scholars working at the intersection of spiritual and sexual abuse in minority contexts like India, Nigeria, South Africa, the U.K., and the U.S. The collection gives special attention to the roles that anti-Muslim hostility and racism play in molding and informing commonly held ideas about gender, sexuality, and who is subject to sexual violence. The project is also accompanied by a website which invites community members and allies to further engage this work through continued conversations.

Another piece, titled “‘In the Name Above All Names’: A Girlboss Builds Her Empire on Sand,” is part of a collaboration between the Smithsonian National Museum for American History and the University of Alabama called Uncivil Religion. It is an open-access resource examining the links between religion and the events of January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol.

Currently, I am a member of Union Theological Seminary’s 2022-2024 “Religion and Racial Justice: Expanding the Moral Imaginary Through Film” cohort, which brings together scholars, faith leaders, activists, and artists of color to explore films centering religion and racial justice through a series of public conversations.

In 2021, I was a Public Scholarship Training Fellow through the Sacred Writes program. I also served as an Andrew W. Mellon Humanities for the Public Good Fellow during my graduate training at UNC Chapel Hill. Here, I worked primarily on state outreach and community college collaborations for the Humanities on the Road initiative at Carolina Public Humanities. This division endeavored to build and strengthen diverse strategic collaborations with schools across North Carolina, especially among underserved populations, by planning and executing public humanities events throughout the state.

I regularly give public talks at universities, high schools, and middle schools on a variety of issues related to Islam. These range from topics like religion and contemporary South Asian politics, to anti-Muslim hostility and Islamophobia in the United States, to the racial and sexual diversity within American Muslim communities. Please reach out directly if you’d like me to speak at your school or event.