Shenila Khoja-Moolji
Associate Professor, Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani Chair of Muslim Societies
Professor Khoja-Moolji holds the Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani Endowed Chair of Muslim Societies and is an Associate Professor at Georgetown University. She is an award-winning author whose research explores the interplay of gender, race, religion, and power in transnational contexts. She explores this theme particularly in relation to Muslim populations in South Asia and the North American diaspora.
Professor Khoja-Moolji’s book Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia (University of California Press, 2018) combines historical and cultural studies analyses with ethnographic work to examine the figure of the ‘educated girl’ in colonial India and postcolonial Pakistan. The book was awarded the 2019 Jackie Kirk Outstanding Book Award from the Comparative and International Education Society, and the 2019 Michael Harrington Award from The Society for the Study of Social Problem’s Poverty, Class, Inequality Division.
Her second book, Sovereign Attachments: Masculinity, Muslimness, and Affective Politics in Pakistan (University of California Press, 2021) engages in a study of the cultural and affective dimensions of sovereignty. Through a close reading of an array of cultural texts produced by the Pakistani state and the Pakistan-based Taliban, Khoja-Moolji theorizes sovereignty as an ongoing attachment negotiated in public culture. The book won the 2022 Best Book Award from the International Studies Association's Theory Section; the 2022 Book Award from the Association for Middle East Women's Studies; Honorable Mention for the 2022 Lee Ann Fujii Book Award, International Studies Association; and, Honorable Mention for the 2022 Best Book Award by the Global Development Studies Section.
Professor Khoja-Moolji's third book, Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality (Oxford University Press, 2023) traces the transnational lives of Ismaili Muslim women. It follows their journeys, past and present, from colonial India to East Africa and then onto North America, and outlines the everyday forms through which they create spaces of joy, forge community, and practice ethical subjectivities. The book won the 2024 Nautilus Book Award, which honors contributions in social justice and social change; was a finalist for 2024 American Academy of Religion's book award for Excellence in the Study of Religion; and received the 2024 Honorable Mention award from the Association for Feminist Anthropology (American Anthropological Association) for the Senior Book Prize, which recognizes a senior scholar’s book that advances the theory, method, and epistemological scope of feminist anthropology.
In her latest book, The Impossibility of Muslim Boyhood (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), Professor Khoja-Moolji asks: How do we understand an incident where a five-year-old Muslim boy arrives at Dulles airport and is preemptively detained as a “threat”? To answer that question, she examines American public culture, arguing that Muslim boyhood has been invented as a threat within an ideology that seeks to predict future terrorism. Muslim boyhood bridges actual past terrorism and possible future events, justifying preemptive enclosure, surveillance, and punishment. Even in the occasional reframing of individual Muslim boys as innocent, Professor Khoja-Moolji identifies a pattern of commodity antiracism, through which elites buy public goodwill but leave intact the collective anti-Muslim notion that fuels an expanding carceral and security state. Framing Muslim boyhood as a heuristic device, she turns to a discussion of Hindutva ideology in India to show how Muslim boyhood may be resituated in global contexts.
Professor Khoja-Moolji serves as a steering committee member for the Asian North American Religion, Culture, and Society unit of the American Academy of Religion; as a board member of the Ismaili Tariqa and Religious Education, USA; and recently completed her term as an elected member of the South Asia Council on the Association for Asian Studies.
Professor Khoja-Moolji holds an undergraduate degree from Brown University, a masters from Harvard University, and a doctorate from Columbia University. She was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania.