Su'ad Abdul Khabeer

Su’ad is a scholar-artist-activist. Her current project, Umi's Archive, is an interdisciplinary research project that that engages everyday Black women’s thought to investigate key questions of archives and power. Drawing on her umi's (Black Arabic for mother) archive, Umi's Archive is an digital humaniteis exhibition series, an analytical space to engage the many facets of Blackness, and an imaginative space to remember the past in order to dream the future. Trained as an anthropologist, her first book Muslim Cool: Race, Religion and Hip Hop in the United States is a field defining study of race, religion, and popular culture in the 21st century.  She has a deep commitment to public scholarship and reaches diverse audiences through her one-woman solo performance, Sampled: Beats of Muslim Life and in her leadership (2015-2022) of the award-winning Sapelo Square: An Online Resource on Black Muslims in the Untied States. In line with this committement, Su'ad has also written for The Root, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Ebony Magazine, the Huffington Post, Religious Dispatches and Trans/Missions, and has appeared on Al Jazeera English. Additionally, her poetry was featured in the anthology Living Islam Out Loud: American Muslim Women Speak. In 2018, Su’ad was profiled as one of 25 influential American Muslims by CNN and received the Open Society Equality Fellowship in 2019. She was Hunting Family Faculty Fellow at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities in 2022-2023.

Affiliations:

Core Faculty: Program in Arab and Muslim American Studies (AMAS)

Affiliated Faculty: Department of Afroamerican and African Studies

Affiliated Faculty: Latino/a Studies