Education & Professional History
Harvard University, MA; PhD
My teaching and research intersect Islamic Studies, American religious history, and Middle East Studies. I have devoted my academic career to understanding and explaining how representations of Islam in doctrinal, somatic, textual, spatial, visual, aural, and sociopolitical forms have shaped human history. I have pursued this question through the study of diverse sources ranging from theological and philosophical treatises to mosque architecture and ablution socks. My courses and scholarship focus on varying regions and time periods, reflecting my diverse interests, but I feel most at home in the 7th-10th centuries and 19th-21st centuries in the Arabic- and Persian-speaking world and in Anglophone regions of North America. I am best known in the academy for my work on The History of Islam in America, which was supported by a Carnegie Scholar grant, and for my forthcoming work which has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Luce-AAR grant on The Mosque in Islamic History.
In trying to understand the historical weight of diverse representations of Islam, I have had to grapple with a deceptively simple methodological and theoretical question: How does one understand and represent another person’s (or community’s) lived history both empathetically and critically, across time, space, and cultures? In my teaching and scholarship, I strive to empower–and to challenge–students and the general public with rigorous methods and robust concepts through which they can answer this question for themselves, using sources of Islamic provenance.
At Carleton since 2023.
Current Courses
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Fall 2025
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Winter 2026
RELG 300:
Theories and Methods in the Study of Religion
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Spring 2026
MEST 110:
Introduction to the Middle East
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Select Books
Select Chapters and Articles
- “Islam and Anxieties of Liberalism in Craig Thompson’s Habibi” in Comics, Culture & Religion: Faith Imagined, ed. Kees de Groot. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024.
- “The Masjid in the Qur’an” in Non Sola Scriptura: Essays on the Qur’an and Islam in Honour of William A. Graham, eds. Bruce Fudge, Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, Christian Lange, Sarah Savant. London: Routledge, 2022, 66-90.
- “Ablution Socks: The Logic of Market Capitalism and Its Limits” in MAVCOR Journal, v. 6, no. 2 (2022): https://mavcor.yale.edu/mavcor-journal/ablution-socks.
- “Muslim Migration, Citizenship, and Belonging in U.S. Politics of Secularism” in Religion, Secularism, and Political Belonging, eds. Leerom Medovoi and Elizabeth Bently. Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 2021, 251-263.
- “Structuring Sovereignty: Islam and Modernity in the Mosque of Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha” in Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief, v. 16, no. 3 (2020), 317-344.
- “U.S. Muslim Philanthropy after 9/11” in Journal on Muslim Philanthropy and Civil Society, v. 1, no. 1 (2017), 4-22.
- “Prioritizing Metaphysics over Epistemology: Divine Justice (‘Adl) and Human Reason (‘Aql) in al-Shaykh al-Mufīd’s Theology” in Essays in Islamic Philology, History, and Philosophy, ed. Alireza Korangy, Wheeler Thackston, Roy Mottahedeh, and William Granara. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016.
- “Religious Normativity and Praxis among American Muslims” in Cambridge Companion to American Islam, ed. Juliane Hammer and Omid Safi. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 208-227.
- “Islamophobia and American History: Religious Stereotyping and Out-grouping of Muslims in the United States” in Islamophobia in America: The Anatomy of Intolerance, ed. Carl W. Ernst. New York: Palgrave, 2013, 53-74.
- “The Epistemological Foundation of Conceptions of Justice in Classical Kalām: A Study of ‘Abd al-Jabbār’s al-Mughnī and Ibn al-Bāqillānī’s al-Tamhīd” in Journal of Islamic Studies, v. 19, no. 1 (2008), 71-96.
Good food, hiking, biking, and watching soccer (Go Gunners!)
