DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY

Area(s) of Interest

20th Century Chinese History, Anthropology of Muslim Societies, Religious Activism, Friedrich Nietzsche

Biography

After my degree from the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan, I moved to England for a three-year postdoctoral position in the Contemporary China Studies Program at the University of Oxford. I am working with Chinese-speaking Muslim activists in Beijing and in northwestern China to study education reform at Muslim schools, translation, and the publication of Muslim periodicals from the nineteen- nineties to the present. Currently I am studying a Chinese novelist who was one of the first Red Guards (in fact, he coined the term Red Guard), but then turned to Islam in the nineteen-eighties. I am bringing Nietzsche to the context of Muslims in China to study creating ethical meaning in an authoritarian state as politically relevant self-fashioning. I am coming to Northwestern University as a Visiting Assistant Professor and will teach in my first year courses in Sociology and Anthropology.