About

Sylvia Chan-Malik is a scholar of American studies, critical race and ethnic studies, women’s and gender studies, and religious studies. Her research focuses on the history of Islam in the United States, specifically the lives of U.S. Muslim women, Black American Islam, and the rise of anti-Muslim racism in 20th- and 21st-century America. She explores the intersections of race, gender, and religion in struggles for social justice and racial liberation. She is a core faculty member in the Departments of American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, and an affiliate graduate faculty for the Department of Religion. She teaches courses on Race and Ethnicity in the U.S., Islam in/and America, Race and Religion, Social Justice, Food Justice, and Islam and Gender. She is the author of 'Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color and American Islam,' which was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Magazine, and is working on two book projects: one offering an essential history of Islam and Muslims in the U.S. for a general audience, and another examining the roles of soul and spirit in racial liberation movements in America. Her work has been featured in various media outlets, and she has contributed to documentaries and public discussions on U.S. Muslim politics, culture, and racial and gender politics.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• Philosophy
• History
• Art history
• Religious studies
• Theology
• Art

Selected publications

• Chadors, Feminists, Terror

  2026-01-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Soundtrack to a Movement: African American Islam, Jazz, and Black Internationalism by RICHARD BRENT TURNER

  Sociology of Religion · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Religious studies
  • Art
  PublisherDOI

• Suspect Communities: Anti-Muslim Racism and the Domestic War on Terror By Nicole Nguyen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. 328 pp., $108 cloth, $27 paperback.

  The Journal of Race Ethnicity and Politics · 2021-01-05

  article1st authorCorresponding

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

• Being Muslim

  New York University Press eBooks · 2019-01-25 · 32 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  <italic>Being U.S. Muslims: A Cultural History of Women of Color and American Islam</italic> offers a previously untold story of Islam in the United States that foregrounds the voices, experiences, and images of women of color in the United States from the early twentieth century to the present. Until the late 1960s, the majority of Muslim women in the U.S.—as well as almost all U.S. Muslim women who appeared in the American press or popular culture, were African American. Thus, the book contends that the lives and labors of African American Muslim women have—and continue to—forcefully shaped the meanings and presence of American Islam, and are critical to approaching issues confronting Muslim women in the contemporary U.S. At the heart of U.S. Muslim women’s encounters with Islam, the volume demonstrates, is a desire for gender justice that is rooted in how issues of race and religion have shaped women’s daily lives. Women of color’s ways of “being U.S. Muslims” have been consistently forged against commonsense notions of racial, gendered, and religious belonging and citizenship. From narratives of African American women who engage Islam as a form of social protest, through intersections of “Islam” and “feminism” in the media, and into contemporary expressions of racial and gender justice in U.S. Muslim communities, <italic>Being U.S. Muslims</italic> demonstrates that it is this continual againstness— which the book names <italic>affective insurgency</italic>—that is the central hall marks of U.S. Muslim women’s lives.

  PublisherDOI

• Raising Muslim Girls:

  University of Minnesota Press eBooks · 2018-05-15 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam

  2018-06-26 · 64 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  2018 Outstanding Academic Title, given by Choice MagazineAn exploration of twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. Muslim womanhood that centers the lived experience of women of color For Sylvia Chan-Malik, Muslim womanhood is constructed through everyday and embodied acts of resistance, what she calls affective insurgency. In negotiating the histories of anti-Blackness, U.S. imperialism, and women’s rights of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Being Muslim explores how U.S. Muslim women’s identities are expressions of Islam as both Black protest religion and universal faith tradition. Through archival images, cultural texts, popular media, and interviews, the author maps how communities of American Islam became sites of safety, support, spirituality, and social activism, and how women of color were central to their formation. By accounting for American Islam’s rich histories of mobilization and community, Being Muslim brings insight to the resistance that all Muslim women must engage in the post-9/11 United States. From the stories that she gathers, Chan-Malik demonstrates the diversity and similarities of Black, Arab, South Asian, Latina, and multiracial Muslim women, and how American understandings of Islam have shifted against the evolution of U.S. white nationalism over the past century. In borrowing from the lineages of Black and women-of-color feminism, Chan-Malik offers us a new vocabulary for U.S. Muslim feminism, one that is as conscious of race, gender, sexuality, and nation, as it is region and religion

  PublisherDOI

• Islam in the arts in the USA

  2014-08-20

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Asian American Religions in a Globalized World

  Amerasia Journal · 2014-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Guest editors Sylvia Chan-Malik and Khyati Joshi provide an overview of the special issue on Asian American religions. The introduction traces the history of the study of Asian American religions, describing trends and development of the field. In particular, they focus on religion and Asian American racialization in the wake of 9/11. The essay includes a summary of the pieces collected in the special issue.

  PublisherDOI

• “A Space for the Spiritual”: A Roundtable on Race, Gender, and Islam in the United States

  Amerasia Journal · 2014-01-01 · 22 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This roundtable features leading thinkers on Islam and gender. The contributors provide brief opening statements on their work on Islam, race, and gender. The roundtable includes a discussion of key terms in the field, whether the scholars identify as Muslim American or American Muslim, and the relationship between feminism and Islam.

  PublisherDOI

• The Cambridge Companion to American Islam

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2013-08-05 · 48 citations

  book

  The Cambridge Companion to American Islam offers a scholarly overview of the state of research on American Muslims and American Islam. The book presents the reader with a comprehensive discussion of the debates, challenges and opportunities that American Muslims have faced through centuries of American history. This volume also covers the creative ways in which American Muslims have responded to the myriad serious challenges that they have faced and continue to face in constructing a religious praxis and complex identities that are grounded in both a universal tradition and the particularities of their local contexts. The book introduces the reader to some of the many facets of the lives of American Muslims that can only be understood in their interactions with Islam&amp;apos;s entanglement in the American experiment.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Juliane Hammer

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  5 shared

• Khyati Y. Joshi

  3 shared

• Su’ad Abdul Khabeer

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  3 shared

• Akel Ismail Kahera

  Hamad bin Khalifa University

  1 shared

• Evelyn Alsultany

  1 shared

• Amaney Jamal

  1 shared

• Maryam Kashani

  1 shared

• Nabil Echchaibi

  University of Colorado Boulder

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Educa…
• Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies at Princet…
• Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Magazine for Being Musl…