Najwa Mayer is a Society of Fellows postdoctoral scholar at Boston University, with affiliations in Religion and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. As an interdisciplinary scholar of cultural and popular politics, her research and teaching fields intersect Asian American and ethnic studies, critical Muslim and religious studies, gender and sexuality studies, as well as visual, literary and media studies. Broadly, her research investigates how gender and sexuality structure racial and religious politics in the US and its empire, with particular interest in the 20th and 21st centuries and the “long war on terror.” Therein, her areas of specialization and writing include Muslim and South/West Asian migrations and social movements in North America; Islam and Islamophobia in the US; race and racialization; transnational feminisms; US empire and anti-imperial critique; and South/West Asian cultural production. Her first book manuscript examines this century’s mass globalization of and contentions within “Muslim American” popular cultures through the interrelations between racial, sexual, and secular politics, genres, and markets within cultural economies of war. Her research has received support from the Social Science Research Council, Andrew Mellon Foundation, and Henry Luce Foundation, among others. Najwa holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University.

Prior to joining BU, Najwa was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and in the Leslie Center for Humanities at Dartmouth College, where she taught courses and developed programs in Asian American Studies. Her earlier professional roles include curatorial and teaching work in art museums as well as public education and organizing with youth and migrant communities.