Rising Scholars in Islamic Studies Mentoring WebinAAR

Samah Choudhury is Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at DePaul University and holds a visiting scholar appointment with the Department of Religious Studies at Northwestern University. Her work has been supported by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice, the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies, the Asian American Religions Research Initiative, the Center for Islam in the Contemporary World, and the UNC Chapel Hill Asian American Center, among others.

Sohaib Khan is Assistant Professor in Religious Studies at Occidental College. Khan is a scholar of comparative Islamic studies with an interest in connections between religion, secularism, and economic life in Muslim societies. His research, teaching, and public scholarship lie at the intersection of Islamic legal studies, anthropology, postcolonial studies, and histories of capitalism in South Asia and the Middle East. Khan is trained as an interdisciplinary historian and ethnographer.

Hussein Rashid is founding co-director of Religion and Public Life at Union Theological Seminary. His also founder of the consultancy islamicate, which focuses on critical religious literacy and cultural production. He has published extensively on Muslims in the US, including on diaspora identity, popular culture, intra-Muslim racism, museums, and Shi’i thought. His works including meanings of Imam Ali in the US Muslim experience. He’s produced award winning documentaries for The New York Times, and multiple series for PBS in the US. He works with a variety of museums, most recently as Project Director of The Arts of Devotion at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. He serves on the boards of Anikaya Dance Theater and the Interfaith Center of New York. His most recent projects are in Muslim Futurism.

Kayla Wheeler is Assistant Professor for the Gender and Diversity Studies Program and Theology Department at Xavier University. Her research explores Black Muslim women’s material culture, digital religion, and contemporary Islam in the Americas. She is writing a book entitled, Fashioning Black Islam, which provides a history of Black Muslim fashion in the United States from the 1930s to the present. She is also working on a digital humanities project, Mapping Malcolm’s Boston, which explores Malcolm X’s life in Boston from the 1940s to 1950s. Dr. Wheeler is the curator of the award-winning Black Islam Syllabus .