About

Nabil Echchaibi is an Associate Professor and Interim Department Chair of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he also serves as Associate Director of the Center for Media, Religion and Culture. His research is situated at the intersection of contemporary issues such as identity, religion, and the role of media in shaping and reflecting modern religious subjectivities among Muslims in the Middle East and in diaspora. His work on diasporic media and the leveling of religious authority through the proliferation of Islamic media has been published in various international publications. He is currently working on a book titled 'Formations of the Muslim Modern: Islam, Media and Alternative Modernity,' which explores how Muslims engage with modernity through their own media production, examining how transnational satellite television and digital media serve as stages for debates on what it means to be 'modern' in the Muslim context, through case studies in Cairo, Los Angeles, Dubai, San Francisco, London, and Austin. Dr. Echchaibi also directs a project funded by the Social Science Research Council to compile a cultural history of Muslims in the Mountain region of the United States, producing an interactive web resource and a documentary film. His previous work includes the book 'Voicing Diasporas: Ethnic Radio in Paris and Berlin Between Culture and Renewal' and the co-edited volume 'International Blogging: Identity, Politics and Networked Publics.' A native of Morocco, he earned his BA from Mohammed V University in Rabat and his MA and PhD from Indiana University-Bloomington. Prior to his current position, he taught at Franklin College in Lugano, Switzerland, the University of Louisville, and Indiana University-Bloomington.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Literature
• Political economy
• Media studies
• Law
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• A breakup letter with media studies

  Communication Culture and Critique · 2025-12-11

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract It has become impossible to identify with a field and academic institutions that refuse to answer a basic call of human decency: to denounce an ongoing genocide. What else must we, as scholars and educators, do to convince all of us to speak up, to liberate us from the sentence of silence in the face of unspeakable tragedy? Everything I have learned under the banner of research, ethics, and justice has been muted in Palestine. Seventy thousand people massacred in Gaza, 1,100 university students killed, 193 professors murdered, all 12 universities demolished, 220 journalists eliminated, and yet some still wish to debate this horrid devastation of life. This article is not a call for recognition. It is a requiem of the university as it abandons its conscience. It is an elegy for an institution with no moral credibility. This breakup letter marks a painful realization that our marginalization and dehumanization are well-rehearsed within institutions eager to flaunt intellectual virtue, humanism, and analytical lucidity. Yet again we charge genocide:

  PublisherDOI

• A Scream for Gaza

  Critical Sociology · 2024-05-30 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Third Spaces of Digital Religion

  Routledge eBooks · 2023 · 39 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  PublisherDOI

• Conjunctures

  Cultural Studies · 2023-06-22

  article1st author
  PublisherDOI

• Muslims, Art, and Invisible Modernities

  2023-06-09

  otherOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Introduction

  Routledge eBooks · 2023 · 5 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science

  The new modes of digital communication have both lay and scholarly discourses struggling to adapt. The descriptive challenge is, indeed, a formidable one as the range and depth of implications in technology, society, culture, and practice have yet to fully reveal themselves. In the field of architecture and planning, “third space” has been identified with the work of Edward Soja, whose influence has spread well beyond. Emerging expressions of digital religion are significantly articulated with two important trends: the coincidence of the increasing prominence of digital mediation on the one hand and the persistence and re-imagining of the category of “the religious” in contemporary life on the other. The digital sphere is a central social and cultural phenomenon and a dominant theme of much contemporary public and private discourse. Religion has had a troubled and contested place in media studies.

  PublisherDOI

• Muslims between Transparency and Opacity

  2022-01-01 · 1 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• In praise of Arab ‘Defeat’: another reading of Arab struggle

  Cultural Studies · 2021 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  This article seeks to detach the 2011 Arab uprisings from an ontology of revolution and resistance that relegates them only to a discourse of success and failure. While the grievances of street mobilization of millions of protesters are familiar, they cannot be contained in a narrative that simply measures them against a Western prototype of democracy or a blueprint of revolutionary practice. Such an analysis, I argue, dilutes the contextual specificity of these events by subsuming them into an exhaustive model they either conform to or deviate from. Instead, I ask, what if we opened up the archive to read these events differently? What if we wrote against the grain and tempo of that dominant archive to demystify Arab societies and evoke a long view of Arab protest, a view that is not obsessed with interpretive ease and an external political expediency? Drawing on a historical record of continuous struggle in Morocco and using the media work of Hicham Lasri as an example, this article provides an alternative reflection on the necessity to read these uprisings as a persisting expression of a people’s demand for agency, dignity, and possibility in societies still afflicted by the burdens of autocracy, corruption, and neoliberalism and tormented by their quest for political rights and cultural independence. The ‘Arab Spring’ in this analysis ceases to be a singular event or a fleeting spectacle of revolutionary potential.

  PublisherDOI

• Conjuring the Religious, the Global and the Mediated

  2021-06-21 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  2021-06-21 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Juliane Hammer

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  5 shared

• Stewart M. Hoover

  5 shared

• Kristin M. Peterson

  2 shared

• Rachael Liberman

  2 shared

• Su’ad Abdul Khabeer

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  2 shared

• Sally Howell

  1 shared

• Timur R. Yuskaev

  1 shared

• Debra Majeed

  1 shared

Labs

• YatmoPI

Education

• B.A.

  Mohammed V University

• M.A.

  Indiana University-Bloomington

• Ph.D.

  Indiana University-Bloomington