About

Yasmin Moll is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan's LSA Department of Studying Religion. She is an anthropologist specializing in religion, race, and media with a focus on the Middle East. Moll's research explores the role of Islamic television in Egypt’s 2011 revolution, and she is engaged in projects examining the global social life of 'moderate Islam' and Nubian cultural and material heritage. Her work includes ethnographic film and multimodal projects that analyze raced identities, displacement, and the social memory of Nubia, emphasizing indigeneity and race within Middle Eastern contexts. Moll teaches undergraduate courses on the anthropology of Islam, religion, media, and politics, as well as graduate seminars on religion, critique, and Muslim societies. She co-convenes the sensory pedagogy program 'The Abrahamic Sensorium,' which has received the 2023 Provost Teaching Innovation Prize.

Research topics

• Sociology
• History
• Epistemology
• Philosophy
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Religious studies
• Law
• Gender studies
• Social psychology
• Art
• Theology
• Ancient history
• Media studies
• Literature
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• Visualizing erasure: Co‐creating comics and animation from revolutionary street art to Nubian memories of displacement in Egypt

  Visual Anthropology Review · 2024-09-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract This article discusses how Faye Ginsburg's work on Indigenous filmmaking and commitment to shared anthropology inspired us to pursue unconventional forms of visual anthropology adapted to our own ethnographic contexts in post‐revolutionary Egypt. Specifically, we discuss Hamdy's work on the collaborative graphic novel Lissa and Moll's collaborative animation short Hanina. The affordances of these illustrated genres and mediums for collaborative co‐creation with our interlocutors enabled better ways to depict that which is no longer tangibly present yet persists in memories and longings. The specific histories of each media resonated with how the communities sought to represent themselves, a powerful example of what Ginsburg calls “aesthetic accountability.” We also reflect on how comics and animation, through greater anonymity, can help us attain safety as a production value under authoritarianism.

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• Flooded Pasts: UNESCO, Nubia, and the Recolonization of Archaeology. William Carruthers (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022). Pp. 336. $62.95 cloth. ISBN: 9781501766442

  International Journal Middle East Studies · 2024-08-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• CHAPTER 9 Television is Not Radio : Theologies of Mediation in the Egyptian Islamic Revival

  Leiden University Press eBooks · 2023-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Never mind Cleopatra – what about the forgotten queens of ancient Nubia?

  2023-06-09

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Can there be a Godly ethnography? Islamic anthropology, epistemic decolonization, and the ethnographic stance

  American Anthropologist · 2023-08-23 · 34 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Can there be a Godly ethnography? This article explores how the epistemic entailments of this question trouble our taken‐for‐granted notions about what decolonizing anthropology demands. Disciplinary decolonization aims at more‐just futures through interrogating Eurocentric ways of knowing and approaching marginalized histories and perspectives as good to think with, not merely about. I argue that far from being a radical challenge, such decolonizing calls are internal to a secular liberal anthropology. The ethical norms they embed take paradigmatic form in the ethnographic stance and its imperative to take difference seriously as a way toward self‐transformation. This stance needs to itself be provincialized as belonging to secular traditions of critical inquiry and their attendant emancipatory politics. By contrast, a Godly ethnography, as put forth in the 1980s call for an “Islamic anthropology” by some Muslim scholars working within a broader Islamization of knowledge movement, is a more radical challenge to the discipline. Here, the study of human differences is oriented neither towards self‐determination nor solidarity but towards divine devotion. Indeed, Islamic anthropology's transcendent telos is difficult to reconcile with the secular ethic of “taking seriously” motivating call for epistemic decolonization. This difficulty necessitates more‐carefully disentangling the question of disciplinary decolonization from political liberation, asking what happens the day after epistemic decolonization.

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• Arab Americans are a much more diverse group than many of their neighbors mistakenly assume

  2023-04-12

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Televised Tears

  Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East · 2021 · 5 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Aesthetics

  Abstract The practice of feigning weeping in devotional contexts, including in hortatory preaching, is closely associated in Egypt with Islamic Revivalism. It is an expression of pious humility through which worshippers pretend to cry in order to (ideally) develop the embodied capacity to shed tears in the future. Secular Egyptians tend to dismiss such weeping as insincere, but so, too, do many participants in the piety movement in a specific context: on-camera weeping. Drawing on fieldwork with Islamic television preachers and their followers in Cairo, this article explores how the mass-mediated artifice of preacherly weeping provokes expressions of religious ambivalence about an otherwise authoritative ritual practice. While televised tears facilitate the sense of intimacy that many viewers identify as key to their religious adherence, the preacher's lachrymose passion as dramaturgical enskillment coexists uneasily with the pious discipline of sincere self-cultivation. Understanding why this is so illuminates the changing criteria for ritual aptness in a mass media age.

  PublisherDOI

• Subtitling practices in Islamic satellite television

  2021-11-29

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Egyptian translators working at Iqraa – the world’s first Islamic television channel – use a variety of strategies in subtitling Arabic-language preaching programmes into English. These translators see their task as twofold: to act as ‘cultural mediators’ responsible for countering perceived Western stereotypes about Muslims, on the one hand, and, on the other, to transmit as ‘preachers by proxy’ correct and relevant religious knowledge to viewers when, at times, the Arab preachers they subtitle fail to do so. Translators feel authorized to contest through subtitles both external representations of Islam and internal interpretations of divine intent. Far from being just exercises in interlingual equivalence, subtitling is a form of moral critique motivated by both postcolonial and theological imperatives. These acts of translation, and their internal debate at Iqraa, exceed the familiar Euro-American antimony of fidelity and betrayal.

  PublisherDOI

• The Idea of Islamic Media: The Qur'an and the Decolonization of Mass Communication

  International Journal Middle East Studies · 2020 · 23 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Abstract The emergence of Islamic television in the Arab Middle East is usually explained as part of a Saudi media empire fueled by neoliberal petro-dollars. This article, by contrast, takes seriously the role ideas played alongside changing political economies in the origins of the world’s first Islamic television channel, Iqraa. Focusing on the intellectual and institutional career of “Islamic media” ( al-i’lām al-Islāmī ) as a category from the late sixties onwards in Egypt, I argue that Islamic television is part of a broader decolonization struggle involving the modern discipline of mass communication. Pioneering Arab communication scholars mounted a quest for epistemic emancipation in which the question of how to mediate Islam became inextricable from the question of what made media Islamic. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research, I show how the idea of Islamic media involved a radical reconceptualization of the Qur'an as mass communication from God and of Islam as a mediatic religion. This positing of an intimate affinity between Islam and media provoked secular skepticism and religious criticism that continue to this day. I conclude by reflecting on how the intellectual history of Islamic media challenges dominant framings of epistemological decolonization as a question of interrogating oppressive universalisms in favor of liberatory pluralisms.

  PublisherDOI

• Living through Thick Concepts in Revolutionary Egypt

  International Journal Middle East Studies · 2020 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Ancient history

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Frequent coauthors

• Sherine Hamdy

  University of California, Irvine

  1 shared