About:
I’m a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Anthropology. Prior to my doctoral studies, I completed my undergraduate degree at U.C. Berkeley (highest honors) and later trained in theology and philosophy at Harvard (MTS). Currently, I am finishing my dissertation entitled Who is the Subject of Civil Rights? Race, Islam, and Security in the American South. As a historically-informed sociocultural anthropologist, I study the legacies of violence experienced by religiously and racially marginalized communities in the American South and the persistent forms this violence takes in the wake of critical events. My dissertation project concerns the reception of this violence in North Carolina among Muslim American communities and their subsequent recourse to governmental and non-governmental legal organizations and institutions. In this context, I'm concerned with how the Islamic tradition, its sciences and jurisprudence, are made intelligible and reinterpreted when confronted with legal, political, and social forces that are inimical to its development and transmission. This research has been recognized and supported by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), Wenner-Gren Foundation, Ford Foundation, and numerous research and grant programs at the University of California, Berkeley.
M.A. Anthropology, 2019, University of California, Berkeley
M.T.S. Philosophy and Theology, 2016, Harvard Divinity School
B.A. Anthropology, 2014, University of California, Berkeley