Sylvia Chan-Malik is Associate Professor in the Departments of American and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She talks, teaches, and writes about the intersections of race, gender, and religion, with a focus on the history and cultures of Islam and Muslims in the United States. Her research highlights the lives, voices, histories, and representations of Muslim women, and reveals how critical legacies of Black freedom, women’s agency, and global liberation struggles have continually marked U.S. Muslim women’s engagements with Islam.
She is the author of Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam (New York University Press, 2018). Her writings are also featured in the anthologies With Stones in Our Hands: Writings on Muslims, Racism, and Empire (UMinn Press, 2018), Routledge Handbook of Islam in the West (Routledge, 2015), and The Cambridge Companion to American Islam (Cambridge, 2013), and the scholarly journals Amerasia, CUNY Forum, Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion, and The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
At Rutgers, she teaches courses on race and ethnicity in the United States, Islam in/and America, social justice movements, feminist methodologies, multiethnic literature and culture in the U.S., and contemporary U.S. history. In 2018, she received Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences’ Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education.
She speaks frequently on issues of U.S. Muslim politics and culture, Islam and gender, and racial and gender politics in the U.S. Her commentary has appeared in venues such as NPR, Slate News, The Intercept, Daily Beast, PRI, Huffington Post, Patheos, Religion News Service, and others.
She holds a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Mills College, and a B.A. in English and Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley.
sylvia chan-malik 