Instructors

Samah Choudhury, Assistant Instructional Professor

Dr. Samah Choudhury is a visiting faculty member and researcher with the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity for the 2023-2024 academic year, where she will be working on her first book, American Muslim and the Politics of Secularity. Her scholarship surrounds notions of humor, subjecthood, religion, and race in the 21st century United States. How has “a sense of humor” come to be cultivated as a positive personality trait, and where does the American Muslim subject configure against those broader secular confines? Write to her at samah@uchicago.edu.

Pranathi Diwaker, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Rank of Instructor

Pranathi Diwaker has just completed her term as a Teaching Fellow in the Social Sciences at the University, where she earned her PhD in 2022, with a dissertation entitled “Resounding Caste: Practices of Distinction, Urban Segregation, and Musical Politics in Chennai, India”. That project investigates the contours of social inequality in contemporary, urban India and its diaspora through an ethnographic analysis of musical practices of meaning-making, distinction, and resistance to interrogate how they constitute and reproduce social inequality.  After she completes the revisions on her book manuscript, she plans to move on to a comparative study of anti-racist and anti-caste musical social movements in Chicago, New York, Mumbai, and Bangalore.

Maya Singhal, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Rank of Instructor

Maya Singhal is an anthropologist, interested in crime and mutual aid in African and Chinese diasporic populations. Their research and teaching also deals more broadly with race, capitalism, racial capitalism, and intergenerational conflicts. Their current book project is an ethnographic and historical study of African American and Chinese American self- and community defense in New York City and the histories of extralegal neighborhood protection (e.g. gangs, neighborhood patrols and associations, etc.) that inform these present-day efforts towards safety. Singhal received a PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University, MAs from the University of Chicago and New York University, and a BA from New York University.