Najwa Mayer
Assistant Professor | Women’s & Gender Studies | Loyola Marymount University
Los Angeles, CA, UNITED STATES
Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts
Biography
Najwa Mayer is an Assistant Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies at Loyola Marymount University. As an interdisciplinary scholar of cultural and popular 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. Broadly, her research investigates how gender and sexuality structure racial and religious politics in the United States and its empire. Therein, her areas of specialization and writing include migrations, social movements, and cultural production across Muslim and Asian diasporas; Islam and anti-Muslim racism in the US; race and racialization; transnational feminisms; as well as empire-craft and anti-imperial critique. Her first book manuscript examines this century’s mass globalization of and contentions within “Muslim American” popular cultures through the interrelations between racial, sexual, and secular politics, genres, and markets within cultural economies of war. 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 earlier professional roles include curatorial and teaching work in art museums as well as public education and organizing with youth and migrant communities.
