Su'Ad Khabeer

Promoted to Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology
sak@purdue.edu

Su’ad Abdul Khabeer received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in cultural anthropology and is a graduate from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She holds an Islamic studies diploma from the Institute at Abu Nour University (Damascus).

Khabeer is a scholar-artist-activist who uses anthropology and performance to explore the intersections of race and popular culture. Her latest work, Muslim Cool: Race, Religion and Hip Hop in the United States (NYU Press 2016), is an ethnography on Islam and hip hop that examines how intersecting ideas of Muslimness and Blackness challenge and reconstitute U.S. racial orders. Her written work on Islam and hip hop is accompanied by her performance ethnography, Sampled: Beats of Muslim Life. Sampled is a one-woman performance designed to present and represent her research and findings to diverse audiences in a way that disrupts accepted narratives on race and gender, religion, popular culture and citizenship in the contemporary United States.

Her publications include “Muslim Youth Cultures” (The Cambridge Companion to American Islam, 2013), “Rep that Islam: the Rhyme and Reason of American Muslim Hip Hop” (The Muslim World, 2007), and “Black Arabic: African American Muslims and the Arabic language” which appears in the edited volume Black Routes to Islam (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Forthcoming publications include “All the Men are Muslim, All the Americans are White, But Some of Us are Brave” in With Stones In Our Hands: Reflections on Race, Muslims, and U.S. Empire (University of Minnesota Press) and “Africa as Tradition in African American Muslim Identity” in Handbook on African American Islam (Oxford University Press).

Khabeer leads a digital humanities project, www.sapelosquare.com, the first website dedicated to the comprehensive documentation and analysis of the African American Muslim experience.. She is a Senior Project Advisor for the U.S. Public Television award-winning documentary, New Muslim Cool. Her poetry was featured in the anthology Living Islam Out Loud: American Muslim Women Speak.