2026 GRANT RECIPIENTS
This year's grants have been awarded under "Islam in the contemporary world". We are honored to have been able to award research grants to such an accomplished and diverse group of scholars and researchers. To learn more about "Islam on the Edges" and "Islamic Education" please click here.
Humayra Alam
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Humayra Alam is a PhD student in the Department of Architecture at Texas A&M University. Her research interests include South Asian American diaspora, ethnicity and the built environment, and Islamic architecture. Her dissertation explores the co-production of mosque and South Asian American Sunni community in the diaspora of Greater Houston in Texas. Her work has been supported by the Graduate Student Small Research Grant from the Race & Ethnic Studies Institute (RESI) at Texas A&M University, and the Graduate Student Research Fellowship from the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (SESAH).
MOSQUE AS SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE: CO-PRODUCTION OF SPATIALITY AND SOUTH ASIAN AMERICAN (SAA) MUSLIM COMMUNITY IN GREATER HOUSTON, TEXAS This research explores how mosque space is shaped through overlapping devotional, jurisprudential, ethnic, and institutional differences within South Asian Muslim communities in Greater Houston. These influences may appear in architectural expression, spatial organization and functional priorities, language use, fundraising networks, gendered access, event practices, and decisions about what visual features are included, omitted, delayed, or minimized. Through this study, mosques are treated not simply as buildings that reflect an existing community, but as institutions through which religious, educational, social, and organizational life is formed. This research enters larger conversations in architectural history by utilizing existing scholarship on religion and transnationalism as supporting frameworks. It analyzes how mosques are produced spatially, organizationally, and architecturally, and how immigrant communities are formed, governed, reproduced, and differentiated through mosques. |
Jaleh Ebrahimi
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Jaleh Ebrahimi is a Ph.D. candidate in Islamic Studies with a concentration in Gender and Women's Studies at McGill University. She holds an M.A. in the History of Iran from Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran. Her research interests lie at the intersection of qiṣṣahs (tales), primary education, and imagination. She is particularly interested in tracing how lithography and pedagogical ideas transformed the lives of qiṣṣahs in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Iran. Her research received the McGill Building 21 and Margaret Gillett Graduate Research awards in 2026.
Displacing Stories: Qiṣṣahs and the Transformation of Education in Iran (1846–1928) This project examines the transformation of educational materials used in Iranian maktabs (primary schools) between 1846 and 1928, focusing on the marginalization of qiṣṣahs, a longstanding medium of Islamic-Iranian childrearing. By situating qiṣṣahs within the concepts of taʾdīb, tarbiyya, and akhlāq, and redefining them as a form of situated learning, the project highlights the central role of these narratives in transmitting knowledge that exceeded direct instruction. It further demonstrates how Iranian intellectuals, in their efforts to promote educational "progress" for Muslims through reforms grounded in precision, verification, and direct instruction, increasingly criticized these narratives. Drawing on an archive of qiṣṣahs, diaries and memoirs of maktab students, reformist treatises, newspaper articles, and pedagogical manuals, the project traces a broader epistemic shift from an Islamic-Shiʿi eschatological model of childrearing to a more worldly, practical, and intellect-centered form of education. |
Faezeh Izadi
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Faezeh Izadi is a Sessional Instructor and Ph.D. Candidate in Religious Studies at the University of Calgary, as well as an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Toronto. Specializing in Shi‘i intellectual history, her doctoral research examines religious charitable activities through the ethical lens of Effective Altruism. Her broader interests encompass moral philosophy, philanthropic studies, and innovative methods of teaching and learning in religious studies. She holds dual Master's degrees and traditional seminary training. A former Public Humanities Fellow at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities and co-founder of the Muslim Impact Lab and Nuhabase Inc., she has authored multiple peer-reviewed publications and received prestigious honors, including a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship and the al-Mahdi Institute doctoral scholarship.
Towards a Critical Genealogy of Shia Giving: Tracing the Discursive Formations of Zakat and Khums from the Era of the Imams to the Contemporary Period This project presents a critical genealogy of Zakat and Khums in Twelver Shi'ism, tracing their transformation as discursive objects shaped by power, authority, and historical contingency across fourteen centuries. Based on a doctoral dissertation chapter, the study draws on classical Arabic and Persian primary sources, including tafsīr literature, hadith compilations, biographical literature (rijāl), legal treatises, and theological texts. Employing Michel Foucault's framework, the research analyzes five critical historical junctures: the era of the Imams, the Major Occultation, legal systematization from Hilla to Isfahan, the emergence of the modern Marjaʿiyya, and contemporary debates under the Islamic Republic's Wilāyat al-Faqīh. The central thesis contends that Zakat and Khums are not static legal constructs, but fluid mechanisms whose definitions reflect a transfer of authority from the Imams to the juristic class (fuqahāʾ). Mapping these developments illuminates the contingent nature of religious authority and financial autonomy within Shia Islam, developed under predominantly Sunni hegemony. |
Yusuf Karipek
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Yusuf Karipek is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include international migration, social movements, and global and transnational sociology. Focusing on countries of origin, particularly their laws and administrative actions, he examines how migrants’ life outcomes are shaped by the states they leave behind. He studies the reach of state power on diaspora and refugee communities and collective resistance. His projects benefitted from numerous grants, culminated in peer-reviewed journal articles and received prestigious awards including the American Sociological Association's International Migration Section. Prior to his doctoral studies, he earned an M.A. from Tsinghua University and a B.A. from the City University of New York (CUNY).
Ethnic Politics and Transnational Practices among Chinese-Origin Migrants Existing research identifies how host-country institutions shape migrants' life outcomes. Yusuf Karipek’s dissertation shifts attention to the enduring influence of origin states after migration. Drawing on comparative interviews and ethnographic research with Han Chinese, Uyghur, and Tibetan communities in the United States, the project examines how varying forms of origin-state surveillance structure migrants’ cross-border ties and generate divergent outcomes across multiple domains of life. By comparing differently positioned groups from the same country of origin, the dissertation demonstrates how origin-state institutions can become an important source of stratification within immigrant populations. It further examines how migrants collectively adapt to, negotiate, and resist the reach of state power across national borders. |
Yasmin Moll
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Yasmin Moll is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and the author of The Revolution Within: Islamic Media and the Struggle for a New Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2025). Her research on the social life of theology in Muslim-majority contexts has been funded by the NSF, SSRC, ACLS, Fulbright-Hays and Luce Foundation, among others. She is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, covering subjects such as modest fashion within Muslim-American communities, gender in the 2011 Egyptian revolution, and Nubian memories of displacement. She received her PhD in Anthropology from New York University in 2015.
Nubia between Indigenous Heritage and Islamic Universalism This project examines how displacement remakes religious life at Islam's margins. Since the early 1900s, dams have displaced Egypt's Nubians, culminating in the 1964 Aswan High Dam. Celebrated by the state as postcolonial triumph, the dam irrevocably severed Nubians from their ancestral landscape and its attendant social relations. Nubians across generations lament these relations deterioration, yet attempts at ethical recovery refracts distinct theological commitments, fueling debates over what it means to be both properly Nubian and Muslim. Secular-leaning activists seek to revive Nubia's Sufi, Coptic, and Pharaonic pasts as the ground of a cosmopolitan identity, while villagers shaped by Gulf lmigration condemn such revival as bidʿa, a heretical innovation that threatens the doctrinal purity of Islam. Drawing on oral histories, periodicals, ethnographic notebooks, and missionary archives, this project traces how indigenous revival and religious reform collide, showing how the social life of theology shapes the afterlives of heritage. |
Abdullah Omran
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Abdullah Omran is a Ph.D. candidate in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at Indiana University Bloomington and a digital anthropologist whose work bridges anthropology, Islamic studies, and AI. His research examines how digital platforms and computational systems reshape religious authority, ethical reasoning, and everyday life in Arab and Islamic contexts. His work has appeared in leading venues, including the Journal of Islamic Thought and Civilization, the Journal of Digital Islamicate Research, CyberOrient, and edited collections on Islamic ethics and digital media.
Bodies, Visibility, and Moral Conflict: Privacy and Intimacy in Egyptian YouTube Family Vlogs Egyptian family vlogging has become a site where platform-economic incentives, Islamic domestic norms, and parasocial attachment converge to make household life a durable public archive. This article develops the concept of ‘domesticity of access’ to name the structural condition that results: the progressive normalisation of household visibility until access to the home becomes the baseline rather than an exception. Drawing on a digital ethnography of Egyptian family YouTube channels, focusing on Hamdy and Wafaa’s seven-year archive, it traces how a relatability infrastructure, an audience moral economy, and Islamic domestic normativity together sustain and police domestic openness. A hijab removal crisis marks this condition’s outer limit, revealing that domesticity of access is bounded by Islamic moral categories that audiences enforce through organised withdrawal and religious admonition. |
David Owen
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David Owen is an historian of Arabo-Islamic formal reasoning, and a teacher of classical languages and philosophy. His research focuses on sources and networks of intellectual tradition in the far west of the historic Islamic world, as well as the contemporary reception of these traditions in other regions. He defends his dissertation at Harvard University in October 2026.
In Search of the Autograph: The Ṭurra of Ghadīja Bint al-ʿĀqil and the Reconstitution of the Ould Tāh Family Library The ṭurra is a distinctive form of commentary employed by the scholars of Mauritania and surrounding regions: marginal notes in which scholars and their students inscribe ownership, transmission, and explanation, carrying the history of a family and its learning in a few lines. This project pursues the autograph traces of Ghadīja Bint al-ʿĀqil, a woman logician of the Daymānī scholarly tradition, through dispersed manuscripts in private Mauritanian libraries. Building on archival work in public and private collections in Indonesia, Mauritania, Morocco, Senegal, and the United States, it combines codicological analysis of surviving witnesses with on-site survey of a Daymānī family library, once dispersed and now being reconstituted as a single intellectual unit. The aim is preservation and recovery for the historical record: gathering the scholarly corpus of a prominent ʿālima, fragment by fragment, and demonstrating the unique insight family libraries offer into the distant and recent past. |
Kayla Renée Wheeler
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Kayla Renée Wheeler, PhD is an Associate Professor of Critical Ethnic Studies and Theology and the Africana Studies Program Director at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her work explores how Black Muslims use alternative spaces to express their religious selves, build community, and challenge patriarchal and anti-Black social structures. Dr. Wheeler is the author of the digital humanities project, Mapping Malcolm's Boston, which explores Malcolm X's life in Boston from the 1940s to 1950s. She is also the curator of the award-winning Black Islam Syllabus, a crowd-sources resource guide that highlights the histories and contributions of Muslims of African descent.
The Great Physicians: The Nation of Islam and the Construction of Wellness Against White Supremacy The project uses discourse tracing of official Nation of Islam (NOI) literature, speeches, interviews, and social media posts to explore the NOI’s development of a theology of the body centered on health, wellness, and death. I argue that members of the Nation create an Islamicized body that is imagined as thin, healthy, and fertile, which is cultivated through physical fitness, fasting, and holistic medicine. For the NOI, the cure against white supremacy is to spiritually and physically transform their bodies through embracing new logics of health and sharing this knowledge with other Black people. The project reveals how leaders of the NOI draw on their embodied knowledge as Black people in the U.S. to make moral and scientific claims about medicine and healthcare, which have moved beyond their religious community into the broader public sphere via the media, thereby shaping how Americans understand their bodies. |
Eyyup Yilmaz
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Eyyup Yilmaz (Eyyüp Yılmaz) is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Loyola University Chicago, where he is writing his dissertation on secularism in American Islam. His main areas of research are the sociology of religion, with a particular focus on Islam, political sociology, social theory, and the sociology of art. Within this broader intellectual framework, he writes on the intersections of religion and politics, knowledge production and transmission, the idea of the university, and how art and culture, especially artistic representations of social reality, can serve as alternative forms of intellectual and social inquiry.
Secularism in Western Islam: American Muslim Scholars' Imaginations of Secularism American Muslim scholars increasingly shape how Islam is interpreted in the United States, yet their understandings of secularism remain understudied. This project examines how American Muslim scholars articulate, contest, and reframe secularism in their contemporary knowledge-making within America's secular liberal context. Through discourse analysis of scholars' writings, lectures, sermons, and institutional publications, supplemented by in-depth interviews, it analyzes how these scholars negotiate Islamic authority, public religion, and citizenship through their understandings of secularism. Drawing on sociological theories of secularization and critical approaches to secularism as a regulatory framework, the study develops a typology of Islamic secularism imaginaries, including resistance, strategic engagement, and distinctively Islamic rearticulations, and shows how Islamic knowledge production becomes a site where religion's boundaries in public life are contested. |
About our research grant program
Please check our website periodically for calls for research grants and fellowships. We do not accept unsolicited proposals. For further information, please email us at [email protected]. Thank you!