Teaching Record + Approach
Teaching Experience
In the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago, my joint undergraduate and graduate courses address media, racial formations, religion, and decolonial theory. This fall, students will take “Seeing Islam: The Politics of Visual Culture” as well as “Race and the Assemblage of American Moralities.”
While at Ithaca College, I taught courses on religion, race, methodology, and popular culture. My classes introduced students to the animating theories and methods common within the discipline of religious studies, while offering them the opportunity to also engage in their own research and inquiry through an examination of diverse primary sources ranging from film, video games, novellas, poetry, orchestral arrangements, memoirs, and standup comedy routines.
In 2019, I was awarded the UNC Center for Faculty Excellence’s Peer Recognition Teaching Award in Religious Studies.
Courses Taught/Instructor of Record:
Staging Islam: the Trap and Trappings of Representation
Religion, Race, and Social Justice
Engaging Islam
Women and Islam
Religion and Culture
Writing About Religion: Heaven and Hell
Western World Religions
Women/Gender/Islam (UNC)
Modern Muslim Literatures (UNC)
Introduction to Islamic Civilizations (UNC)
Courses Assisted:
Women/Gender/Islam
Introduction to Islamic Civilizations
The Archaeology of Palestine
Introduction to Early Judaism
Teaching Philosophy
My approach to teaching seeks to make theoretical discourses accessible and enactable - something one can use to not just understand scholarly texts, but to critically engage and participate in the world we inhabit.
I work hard to redirect the impulse for categorical and linear answers by drawing attention early and often to the sedimented nature of ideas that masquerade as common sense. This requires an interrogation of what social dictates, formations, and processes establish “religion” or “race” as we define it today. Students are introduced to these concepts first as functions of power and authority which are deliberate in their scope and deployment. By methodically approaching our conceptual foundations as well as our social and political environments, my pedagogical aim is for students to walk away not necessarily having answers their old questions, but having the skills to generate new questions and answers. Instead of concluding if only people knew more about Muslims and Islam, then Islamophobia wouldn’t exist, they are instead critically engaging with the functions of hegemonic discourse, systemic racism, and patriarchy that sustain our working knowledges of Islam in the first place.