Zareena Grewal

Zareena Grewal is an Associate Professor of American Studies, Religious Studies, and Ethnicity Race and Migration. She is a historical anthropologist and documentary filmmaker and has directed and produced a film about the scrutiny of American Muslims’ patriotism (By the Dawn’s Early Light: Chris Jackson’s Journey to Islam (2004)) featured on the Documentary Channel and ESPN. She also writes on the intersections of race and religion in American Muslim communities. Her first book, Islam is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority, a historical ethnography on the global dimensions of Islam’s “crisis of authority,” specifically on transnational pedagogical networks that connect American mosques to the intellectual centers of the Middle East, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo, Egypt, Damascus, Syria, and Amman, Jordan won several awards. Her current book project examines the Quran in the American cultural and political imagination in order to interrogate the limits of American religious tolerance over time. She teaches courses on Muslim diasporas in America, US cultural and political interests in the Middle East, and ethnographic and documentary film.