Aliyah Khan

Director of the Global Islamic Studies Center, International Institute; Associate Professor of English; Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies
she/her

aliyrhan@umich.edu

Office Information:

3164 Angell Hall
hours: Email for appointments.

Afroamerican and African Studies; Faculty

Education/Degree:

Ph.D. in Literature and Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2012
M.F.A. in Creative Fiction Writing, Hunter College of the City University of New York, 2006

About

Dr. Aliyah Khan is an associate professor in the U-M Department of Afroamerican and African Studies and the Department of English Language and Literature. She is also the Director of the Global Islamic Studies Center (GISC) at the International Institute, and affiliate faculty of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies Program, and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender.

Dr. Khan specializes in postcolonial Caribbean literature and the contemporary literature of the Muslim and Islamic worlds, with a focus on the intersections of race, gender, and Islam in the hemispheric Americas, including in immigrant communities in North America. She has also presented and taught widely in the field of Muslim representation in comics and graphic novels.

Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean (Rutgers University Press and University of the West Indies Press, 2020), Dr. Khan’s book, is the first academic monograph on the literature, history, and music of Caribbean Islam, focusing on Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica, and on enslaved Muslim West Africans, indentured Indian colonial sugar plantation laborers, and their Muslim Caribbean descendants. Far from Mecca garnered three national awards: honorable mention in the 2020-2021 Modern Language Association Prize for a first book; the 2018-2019 American Comparative Literature Association Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Award; and the 2017-2018 American Association of University Women (AAUW) Postdoctoral Research National Fellowship award.

Dr. Khan’s work has also appeared in academic venues including GLQ, the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, Caribbean Quarterly, the Journal of West Indian Literature, and Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne. Her nonfiction writing has appeared in media including the Caribbean fiction and nonfiction collection Bookmarked (2021), Pree: Caribbean Literature, Agents of Ishq, the literary magazine Guernica, and forthcoming in the poetry anthology I Will Note Go: Translations, Transformations, and Chutney Fractals (Kaya Press, 2024).

She is an editorial board member of Bloombsbury Critical Guides in Comics Studies, an advisory board member of the Journal for the Study of Indentureship and its Legacies, and a fellow of the U-M Center for World Performance Studies and the Center for Islam in the Contemporary World at Shenandoah University, VA, for her research on Urdu Indo-Caribbean Muslim qasida devotional songs. She is currently conducting research for a project on Caribbean hurricanes, religion, and environment; and a project on digitization at the Walter Rodney National Archives of Guyana.

Reviews of Dr. Khan's work and written interviews can be viewed at American Muslim Today, Religion News (reprinted in the Washington Post), the Guyana Chronicle, the Black Agenda Report, and the Islamic arts forum Bayt al Fann.

Her podcasts and interviews on the Caribbean, Islam, and Muslims can be heard on National Public Radio, The Maydan, Sapelo Square, Strictly Facts: A Guide to Caribbean History & Culture Podcast, the Polis Project, the New Books Network, and Chicago’s Radio Islam. Her interviews of speakers and moderation of Islamic Studies events can be viewed at the Global Islamic Studies Center YouTube channel.

Research Fields