Sylvia Chan-Malik leads discussion of Muslims in the U.S.

Sylvia Chan-Malik, a professor at Rutgers University and scholar of American studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies spent time with students and faculty in the dining hall on Thursday morning, February 21. Her current research focuses on the history of Islam in the United States. Professor Chan-Malik gave a presentation during Period 1, and participated in a round table discussion during Period 2. She spoke about Islam and Muslim culture, their long history in the United States as well as stereotypes and misinformation. She asked students “How do you know you know what you know?” and what sources do they trust when it comes to learning new things? She encouraged them to gain knowledge about Muslims and other cultures by asking them questions directly, first-hand, rather than third party sources. 

Please watch Professor Chan-Malik's address here:


Biography
Sylvia Chan-Malik is a scholar of American studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. Her current research focuses on the history of Islam in the United States. More broadly, she studies the intersections of race, gender, and religion, and how these categories interact in struggles for social justice. Sylvia is the Faculty Director of the WGS Social Justice Minor.

She is the author of Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color and American Islam (NYU Press, 2018) which offers an alternative narrative of American Islam in the 20-21st century that centers the lives, subjectivities, and voices of women of color. In it, she bring together the stories of African American women and their engagements with Islam as social protest religion and spiritual practice; encounters between “Islam” and “feminism” in U.S. media and popular culture; the cultural production and political expressions of South Asian and Arab American Muslim women during the late-20th century; and finally, the diverse experiences of U.S. Muslim women in post-9/11 America. Through their stories, the book tracks Islam’s shifting meanings in women’s lives and in national political and cultural discourse, and situates issues of race and racialization—and in particular, logics of anti-blackness, xenophobia, orientalism, and white nationalism—as critical determinants of women’s experiences of being Muslim in the U.S.
Chan-Malik teaches courses on race and ethnicity in the United States, Islam in America, social justice movements, feminist methodologies, multi-ethnic literature and culture in the U.S., and 20-21st century U.S. history. She is also on the faculty of the American Studies department.
Her next project examines religious hate crimes in the United States.

She holds a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley (2009) and an M.F.A. from Mills College in Creative Writing.
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