Atiya Husain
Associate Professor (on leave)
| Degrees: | BA (University of Michigan), MA and PhD (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) |
| Email: | Atiya.Husain@Carleton.ca |
| Office: | D585 LA (Loeb Building) |
On leave for the 2024-2025 academic year
Drawing on the fields of sociology, legal studies, cultural studies, and Black studies, my research program is guided by a fundamental interest in how “race” constitutes a material reality; is an organizing principle in European colonial structures of thought; and is a contested idiom that is claimed and deployed in multiple and often contradictory ways.
My book, No God but Man: On Race, Knowledge, and Terrorism (2025, Duke University Press) takes the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list as a point of departure for asking a wide array of questions on normativity and the secularization of statistical analysis, the place of Islam for Black revolutionaries like Assata Shakur, and the FBI’s intriguing withdrawal of race categories to describe Muslims considered terrorists. My other recent writings in this stream of research examine counterterrorism in relation to the abolition movement.
In my earlier ethnographic research funded by the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship, I studied race and religion in the lives of Muslims in the US. Papers published from this research explore the racial/religious positioning of black and white Muslims; the materialist analysis of anti-Muslim practices found in some black Muslims’ arguments against the conceptualization of ‘Islamophobia;’ and critiques of the concept of racialization.
Selected Publications
Husain, Atiya. (2021). Deracialization, Dissent, and Terrorism in the FBI’s Most Wanted Program. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 7(2), 208-225
Husain, Atiya. (2021). Islam and the Black Experience. African American Religions in North America, Bloomsbury Religion in North America
Husain, Atiya. (2021). Paper Terror. Adi Magazine
Husain, Atiya. (2020). Official antiracism and the limits of ‘Islamophobia.’ Social Identities
Husain, Atiya. (2020). Terror and Abolition. Boston Review
Husain, Atiya. (2019). Moving beyond (and back to) the black–white binary: a study of black and white Muslims’ racial positioning in the United States. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 42(4), 589–606