Evelyn Alsultany

Evelyn Alsultany is a leading expert on the history of representations of Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. media and on forms of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism.

Alsultany is an Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Prior to her position at USC, Alsultany was an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and an Associate Professor in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan where she co-founded and directed of the Arab and Muslim American Studies (AMAS) program. Alsultany also co-founded the Islamophobia Working Group, a group of faculty, staff, and students who work together and advise the administration on how to create a more inclusive campus environment for students impacted by Islamophobia. She teaches courses on media representations, U.S. cultural and racial politics, and Arab and Muslim Americans, including “Race and Mixed Race,” “Perspectives on 9/11,” “The Middle East in Hollywood,” and “Islamophobia.”

Alsultany is the author of Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11 (New York University Press, 2012) and co-editor of Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging (Syracuse University Press, 2011) and Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora (University of Michigan Press, 2013).

She is the guest curator of the Arab American National Museum’s online exhibit, Reclaiming Identity: Dismantling Arab Stereotypes (www.arabstereotypes.org). In 2017, she collaborated with colleagues at other universities to create the #IslamophobiaIsRacism Online Syllabus.

Her work in the academy and beyond has been widely recognized. In 2012, Alsultany was awarded a Jack G. and Bernice Shaheen Achievement Award. At the University of Michigan, she has been recognized with the Arab Student Association’s Faculty of the Year Award (2018), Harold R. Johnson Diversity Service Award (2015), the Arab Community Leadership Award (2015), the Individual Award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education (2014), and the Arthur F. Thurnau Professorship (2017).

Professor Alsultany’s book, two co-edited volumes, curatorial work, and institution-building work are all driven by a commitment to bringing Arab and Muslim Americans into the broader conversation about racial politics in the U.S., particularly the ways in which the racialization of Arabs and Muslims operates. Her research contends with the fraught cultural politics of Arab and Muslim identities in the contemporary U.S. through an interdisciplinary approach that draws from media and cultural studies, race and ethnic studies, gender studies, and Arab and Muslim American studies.