Campus Directory

Pronouns She/Her

Division Undergraduate Education
Social Sciences Division

Department/College/Unit Rachel Carson College
Oakes College
Anthropology Department

Title Professor of Anthropology
Provost, Rachel Carson and Oakes Colleges

Affiliation Faculty

Faculty Type Regular Faculty

Areas of Expertise Anthropology
Animal-Human Relationships
Sense and Sensation
Islamic Studies
Gender Studies
Feminist Theory
Sexuality

Primary Office Location Oakes College Academic Building

Office Hours for Students/ Office Hours By appointment

Mail Stop Oakes College

Biography, Education and Training

B.A., Harvard University (Social Studies)
M.A., Ph.D., University of Chicago (Anthopology)

I joined UCSC in 2008 as an assistant professor of anthropology and reached full professor a couple of years ago. My first book, The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism, was on Muslim activism and secular politics in France. I’m currently writing a second book, Companion Spirits, on more-than-secular approaches to the Anthropocene. I am also a co-editor of the Michel-Rolph Trouillot Reader.

Over the last few years, my interests have turned toward undergraduate education and UCSC's colleges. I have served as Provost of Kresge College (2022-2026) and Interim Provost of College Nine and John R. Lewis College (2020-2021), and I will begin as Provost of Rachel Carson and Oakes Colleges in July 2026. 

Summary of Expertise

Areas of Research: more-than-human worlds and more-than-multispecies ecologies; secularity and secularism; Islam and ecology; histories of consciousness and the body; Muslim minorities in France/Europe; religious freedom and political pluralism

Undergraduate Education: high-impact First-Year Experiences; experiential learning; multidisciplinary reading seminars; print versus digital reading practices; Transfer Experience

Research Interests

My second book, Companion Spirits: More-than-Secular, More-than-Human Worlds (in production with Duke University Press), takes up the nexus of secularity and the Anthropocene. Companion Spirits begins from the post-humanist premise that we need to reject the anthropocentrism that has brought us to this point of anthropogenic climate change and to learn to live in more-than-human worlds. But it also argues that many of the ways of thinking about, making, and being in the world that have produced the Anthropocene—the idea that nature is inert, that humans are impervious to more-than-human forces, and that human mastery of the universe is possible—are also effects of secularity. Thus any way forward requires that we go beyond secularity as well. Drawing on a variety of sources—autobiography, historiography, ethnography, neuroscience, ethology, theology, and speculative fiction and film—I examine this nexus of the Anthropocene and secularity and account for more-than-human worlds in more-than-secular ways. I also track the secular in its major and minor keys, that is, in both the dominant modes that buttress the Anthropocene and in the submerged sensibilities that do not adhere to secular norms about nature and humanity, spirit and matter, real and illusory. And I find that secular moderns are more porous to more-than-human forces than many of us would have thought. Offering a counter-anthropology of the secular, Companion Spirits invites secular moderns, including those of us in the academy, to surface secularity’s minor keys and embrace our vulnerability as humans, not only to more-than-human forces but also to the unknown and the unknowable, to imagine the present, and the future, otherwise.

My first book, The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (Duke University Press, 2014), alternates between an analysis of Muslim French politics, ethics, and social life and the contradictions of French secularity (laïcité) that this new Muslim subjectivity reflects and refracts. It explores how Muslim French draw on both Islamic and secular-republican traditions as they create new modes of ethical and political engagement, reconfiguring those traditions to imagine a future for France. It also examines how the institutions, political and legal practices, and dominant discourses that comprise French secularity regulate and govern--and profoundly disrupt--Muslim life. In so doing, it traces a series of long-standing tensions immanent to laïcité, tensions not so much generated as precipitated by the presence of Muslim French. It argues, ultimately, that “the Muslim question” is actually a question about secularism.

I have also worked on the nexus of sex and religion in the articulation of modern secularity, analyzing how the secular state’s project of regulating and transforming religious life is interwoven with its project of sexual normalization, i.e. the production of secular, sexually “normal” citizens. I am interested, in other words, in how proper religion and proper sexuality are mutually constituted (often in opposition to each other) by secular rule.

Teaching Interests

Teaching Specialties: secularism and secularity; more-than-human worlds; human/non-human relations; religious studies; anthropology of Islam; religion and gender/sexuality; modernity and difference; postcolonial Britain and France; anthropology of liberalism; anthropology of Western Europe; multiculturalism

Awards, Honors and Grants

2018-19 Weatherhead Fellow, School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, NM

2015-2017 PI, Institute for Humanities Research cluster on "Race, Violence, Inequality, and the Anthropocene", UC Santa Cruz

2014-15 Administrative PI, UCHRI Humanities Studio on Regulating Sex/Religion

2011-12 Hellman Fellow, UC Santa Cruz

2010-2011 Member, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ

2010-2011 U.S. Fulbright Scholar Program

2010-2011 UC President's Faculty Fellowship

2010 UC Center for New Racial Studies research grant

Selected Publications

• “Critique as Care: Saba Mahmood, in memorium.” Critical Times 2(1): 13-22. (2019)    

•  “Supernatureculture.” Forum on “Is This All There Is?” The Immanent Frame. (2017)

•  “Secularism and the Animist Indigene.” Forum on “Indigeneity and Secularity.” The Immanent Frame. (2017) 

•  (with Catherine Raissiguier) “The Impossible Subject of Charlie Hebdo.” Contemporary French Civilization 41(2): 125-144. (Introduction to the special issue) (2016)

•  “Liberté, Egalité, Féminisme?” Dissent (special issue on Feminist Strategies) 63(4): 38-47. (2016)

•  (with Nadia Fadil) “Rediscovering the ‘Everyday Muslim’: Notes on an Anthropological Divide.” HAU: Journal of Anthropological Theory 5(2): 59-88. (2015)

•  “Ethnography and the Politics of Silence.” Cultural Dynamics 26(2): 235-244. (2014)

•  “Intimacy Surveiled: Religion, Sex, and Secular Cunning.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 39(3): 685-708. (2014)

•  The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French the Contradictions of Secularism (Duke University Press, 2014)

•  “Save the Muslim Woman, Save the Republic: Ni Putes Ni Soumises and the Ruse of Neo-liberal Sovereignty.” Modern & Contemporary France 21 (2): 147-165. (2013)

•  “Belief and/in the Law.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 24(1): 71-80. (2012)

•  “Reconfiguring Freedom: Muslim Piety and the Limits of Secular Law and Public Discourse in France.” American Ethnologist 37 (1): 19-35. (2010)

•  “Exceptional Citizens: Secular Muslim Women and the Politics of Difference in France.” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 17 (3): 379-392. (2009)

•  “Droit, laïcité et diversité culturelle. De quelques contradictions françaises” (with C. Eberhardt and N. Gafsia). Revue Interdisciplinaire d’Études Juridiques 54 (2005), pp. 129-169.

•  “The Republic’s ‘Second Religion’: Recognizing Islam in France.” Middle East Report 235: 12-17. (2005)

   

Courses ANTH 238: Bodies, Senses, Selves
ANTH 157 Modernity and Its Others
ANTH 238: Human/Non-Human Entanglements
ANTH 238: Secularity, Science, Religion
ANTH 130T Religion and Politics in the Muslim World
ANTH 130O Postcolonial Britain and France
ANTH 197G Religion, Gender, Sexuality
ANTH 255 Anthropology of Secularism
ANTH 260 Anthropology of Freedom
ANTH 259 Regulating Religion/Sex