Samah Choudhury

Samah Choudhury is an Assistant Professor of Contemporary Islam in the Americas in the Department of Religious Studies at DePaul University. Her research and teaching surround issues of religion, race, gender, and popular culture in the U.S. and around the world. Samah is at work on her first book, Standup Citizen: American Muslim and the Politics of Secularity, which is under advance contract with the University of Chicago Press's Class 200 series. It examines what we refer to as a "sense" of humor, how it has become a prized trait of the modern secular subject, and why present-day Muslims are consistently configured as lacking this comportment. Through a study of the American Muslim standup comedians, she contends that Muslim legibility depends on situating Islam and within the logics of model secular subjecthood and the register of race.  

Her scholarship has been supported by the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies, the Asian American Religions Research Initiative, the Center for Islam in the Contemporary World, the UNC Chapel Hill Asian American Center, the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, and the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice, among others. Samah serves as co-chair of the Study of Islam Unit at the American Academy of Religion, and is a member of the AAR’s steering committees for the Men, Masculinities, and Religion Unit and the American Lecture in the History of Religions. She also engages in public scholarship through podcast interviews, public lectures, and other online venues. 

Prior to joining DePaul, Samah was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago and taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology and Ithaca College. She received her B.A. in Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor before completing an A.M. in Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. In 2020, she earned her Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from UNC Chapel Hill. 
 
You can learn more about her and her work at www.samahchoudhury.com.  

Research Interests: 
Islamic Studies, Religion in the Americas, Race and racialization, Gender and Queer Theory, Secularism Studies, Religion and Film, Asian American Literatures. 

Courses Frequently Taught: 
•    Introduction to Islam 
•    Gender and Sexuality in Muslim Cultures