Shenila Khoja-Moolji
Associate Professor
Professor Shenila 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 scholar of gender, religion, and migration whose work has shaped debates in Islamic studies, gender studies, and comparative and international education. Her research examines how gender, race, religion, and power intersect in the lives of Muslim communities in South Asia and the North American diaspora, with a particular focus on girlhood, masculinity, displacement, and community formation.
She is the author of four award-winning scholarly monographs published with University of California Press, Oxford University Press, and University of Minnesota Press. These books have received multiple national and international awards from bodies such as the Comparative and International Education Society, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, the International Studies Association, the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies, the American Academy of Religion, and the Association for Feminist Anthropology.
In addition to monographs, her research has appeared in flagship journals such as, Signs, Feminist Theory, Policy & Society, Comparative Education Review, Gender and Education, and the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. She is an engaged public scholar, and with essays in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Al Jazeera.
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Her first book, Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia (University of California Press, 2018) combines historical, cultural, and ethnographic analysis to trace the figure of the “educated girl” in colonial India and postcolonial Pakistan. It received 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 Problems (Poverty, Class, and Inequality Division).
Her second book, Sovereign Attachments: Masculinity, Muslimness, and Affective Politics in Pakistan (University of California Press, 2021) examines the cultural and affective dimensions of sovereignty through texts produced by the Pakistani state and the Pakistan-based Taliban. It won the 2022 Best Book Award from the International Studies Association Theory Section and the 2022 Book Award from the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies, and received Honorable Mention for both the 2022 Lee Ann Fujii Book Award (ISA) and the 2022 Best Book Award of the Global Development Studies Section.
In Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality (Oxford University Press, 2023), Professor Khoja-Moolji traces the journeys of Ismaili Muslim women from colonial India to East Africa and North America, showing how they create spaces of joy, forge community, and practice ethical subjectivities in conditions of displacement. The book received the 2024 Nautilus Book Award for contributions to social justice and social change, was a finalist for the 2024 American Academy of Religion Book Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion, and received the 2024 Honorable Mention for the Senior Book Prize of the Association for Feminist Anthropology.
Her most recent book, The Impossibility of Muslim Boyhood (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), analyzes how American public culture constructs Muslim boyhood as a security threat within an anticipatory logic of terrorism, and extends this analysis to Hindutva ideology in India to situate these dynamics within a global landscape of racism, securitization, and carcerality.
Professor Khoja-Moolji serves on the steering committee of the Asian North American Religion, Culture, and Society unit of the American Academy of Religion and on the board of the Ismaili Tariqa and Religious Education, USA, and recently completed a term as an elected member of the South Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies. She holds an undergraduate degree from Brown University, a master’s degree from Harvard University, and a doctorate from Columbia University, and was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania.