Najwa Mayer
Assistant Professor | Women’s & Gender Studies | Loyola Marymount University
Los Angeles, CA, UNITED STATES
Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts
Biography
Najwa Mayer joined Loyola Marymount University as an Assistant Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies in Fall 2024. She also holds a Visiting Postdoctoral Researcher appointment with the Society of Fellows at Boston University. As an interdisciplinary scholar of cultural politics, her research and teaching fields intersect Asian American and ethnic studies, critical Muslim studies, gender and sexuality studies, as well as visual, literary and media cultures. Therein, her areas of specialization and writing include cultural production and social movements across Muslim and Asian diasporas; US empire and anti-imperial critique; race and racialization; Islam in the US; transnational feminisms; and critical refugee studies. She is working on two book projects: The first examines the invention and conventions of “Muslim American” popular cultures through interrelations between racial, sexual, and secular politics, genre forms, and transnational markets. The second traces the transcontinental and interregional supply chains of the long (20th-21st centuries) War on Terror through their material and metaphysical afterlives in refugee literature, visual art, and Islamic-informed political thought across Asian and African diasporas. Her research has received support from the Social Science Research Council, Andrew Mellon Foundation, and Henry Luce Foundation, among others. She holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University.
Prior to joining LMU, Najwa was a Society of Fellows postdoctoral scholar at Boston University and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and in the Leslie Center for Humanities at Dartmouth College. Her other professional histories include curatorial and teaching work in art museums as well as programming and education in nonprofit organizations focused on expanding university access to the communities she comes from: refugee, immigrant, and working-class communities of color.
Najwa is currently co-chair of the SWANA Diaspora Studies Section of the Association for Asian American Studies and a host for the New Books Network podcast.
