Seminar V: Theory

Dahlia E.M. Gubara is Assistant Professor of History at Koç University, Istanbul. Bridging the fields of Islamic and European intellectual history, her work is principally concerned with the production and transmission of knowledge in, and about, the Islamic tradition, and is a regionally focused on the Middle East and Africa.

Her work has appeared in the Journal of Arabic Literature, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, amongst other places. She is completing a book manuscript entitled The Impossible University: al-Azhar between Islamic Tradition and Colonial Modernity, and has begun a long term project tracing the many lives of Luqman al-Hakim in Islamic tradition and beyond.

Cemil Aydin (Ph.D. Harvard University 2002) is professor of global history at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's Department of History. Cemil Aydin's recent publications include the Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia (Columbia University Press, 2007);The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Harvard University Press, Spring 2017); “Rights in Pan-Asian, Pan-Islamic, and Pan-African Thought,” in The Cambridge History of Rights (Volume iv): The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Ed., by Dan Edelstein and Jennifer Pitts (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

Atiya Husain is Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Williams College. She is the author of No God but Man: On Race, Knowledge, and Terrorism. The book takes the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorist list as a point of departure for asking a wide array of questions on normativity and the secularization of statistical analysis, the place of Islam for Black revolutionaries like Assata Shakur, and the FBI's intriguing withdrawal of race categories to describe Muslims considered terrorists.

Her work has been published in scholarly journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, as well as popular outlets including Boston Review, Slate, and Adi Magazine.

Aliyah Khan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies and the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. She is also the Director of the Global Islamic Studies Center (GISC) at the U-M International Institute. She specializes in postcolonial Caribbean literature and the contemporary literature of the Muslim and Islamic worlds, with an intersectional focus on race, gender, and Islam in the hemispheric Americas. Dr. Khan's book Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean, on the literature and music of enslaved Afro-Caribbean and indentured Indo-Caribbean Muslims and their descendants in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica, earned honorable mention in the 2020-2021 Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book.

Gabriel Salgado is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Trinity College. His teaching and research focus on race, colonialism, and temporality in Latin America. In his current project, he examines the development of race in the early modern Spanish Empire, with an emphasis on the racialization of Jewish, Black, and Indigenous peoples.

Tāhir Fuzile Sitoto lectures in the School of Religion, Philosophy and Classics, at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. He obtained his PhD from the University of Cape Town. His current research focus is on Islam and Race, especially in Southern Africa, Black/Africana existential philosophy, Black African Muslim subjectivities, as well as the study of Islam as a spiritual category. He was born in Uitenhage in the Eastern Cape - a province that has produced some of the most prominent leaders of the struggle for liberation in South Africa. Tahir was the first black African National president of the anti-apartheid activist Muslim Youth Movement of South Africa. Before joining the ranks of the academy, he was the resident Imam of the Kwa-Nobuhle Muslim Community.

Délice Mugabo is an assistant professor in Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa. She is a Black feminist geographer and a member of the Third Eye Collective, a group dedicated to transformative justice for Black women survivors of sexual violence. Her publications focus on Black feminist mobilization, radical Black activism in Montreal in the '90s, and anti-Black Islamophobia.

Cord J. Whitaker is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Wellesley, where he specializes in the literature of the Middle Ages and the histories of race and racism. The author of Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking and a host of articles on race and the Middle Ages as well as the editor of important volumes on the topic, Whitaker has led significant initiatives in diversity and inclusion within medieval studies and beyond. He has served on the editorial boards for PMLA, the flagship journal for literary and language studies; Exemplaria, a journal of theory in medieval and early modern studies; and Speculum, the most revered interdisciplinary journal in medieval studies. He also led an international team of editors in the development of Speculum's first ever issue on race in the global Middle Ages. Whitaker currently chairs the Presidential Commission on Race, Ethnicity, and Equity at Wellesley and regularly helps clients large and small develop and implement antiracist cultures as a Senior Antiracism Consultant at Sagely.