DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES

Samah Choudhury is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and Director of Communication Across the Curriculum at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Prior to joining Illinois Tech, she was a postdoctoral researcher and assistant instructional professor at the University of Chicago's Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity where she taught courses on religion, racialization, literature, and visual cultures. She earned her Ph.D. in Islamic Studies at UNC Chapel Hill and taught at Ithaca College as an assistant professor until 2023.

Samah is currently writing her first book, Standup Citizen: American Muslim and the Politics of Secularity, under advance contract with the University of Chicago Press's Class 200 series. It examines what we refer to as a "sense" of humor, how it has become a prized trait of the modern secular subject, and why present-day Muslims are consistently configured as lacking this comportment. Through a study of the American Muslim standup comedians, she contends that Muslim legibility depends on situating Islam and within the logics of model secular subjecthood and the register of race. This academic year, she is a Visiting Scholar with the Department of Religious Studies at Northwestern University and a Research Fellow at the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies. Her scholarship has previously been supported by the Asian American Religions Research Initiative, the Center for Islam in the Contemporary World, the UNC Chapel Hill Asian American Center, the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, and the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice.

 

You can learn more about her and her work at samahchoudhury.com.