Visiting Instructors

Samah Choudhury, Visiting Assistant 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? Choudhury is also an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Ithaca College, where she teaches courses on religion, race, pop culture, and Islam. Write to her at samah@uchicago.edu.

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.