Shenila Khoja-Moolji – Writing-as-Witnessing: Reimagining Displaced Muslim Women's Lifeworlds Through Archival Marginalia
Wednesday, November 17, 2021Lecture Series
4:30 pm CET
Shenila Khoja-Moolji will share a chapter from her forthcoming book which tells the story of how Shia Ismaili Muslim women recreated community in the aftermath of multiple displacements over the course of the twentieth century. This chapter, in particular, considers cookbooks written by three displaced women to uncover how they engage in memory-work and placemaking in the diaspora through the sharing and modification of Ismaili food cultures. The chapter provides an opportunity to reflect on women’s labor in faith communities as well as the lifeworlds of refugees.
Dr. Khoja-Moolji is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College. She is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersections of gender and Islamic studies. Her research interests include, Muslim girlhood(s), masculinities and sovereignty, and Ismaili Muslim women's history. She investigates these topics empirically in relation to Muslims in Pakistan and in the North American diaspora. Dr. Khoja-Moolji is the author of award-winning book, Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia (2018), and Sovereign Attachments: Masculinity, Muslimness, and Affective Politics in Pakistan (2021). She is currently working on a book that traces the transnational lives of displaced Ismaili Muslim women.
This lecture series is jointly curated by faculty involved in Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice, a new project that offers a sustainable platform for students and professors from OSUN colleges to engage in rigorous academic work, express themselves freely, inspire each other through art, and work closely with local and international initiatives to further the feminist agenda for social justice.
Email: [email protected]