Professor Accepted To Islamic Studies Initiative

Communication professor Sahar Khamis was accepted for the honorable position of spring 2014 Mellon Islamic Studies Initiative visiting professor at the University of Chicago.

By Natalie Kornicks

The College of Arts and Humanities would like to congratulate communication professor Sahar Khamis on being accepted for the position of spring 2014 Mellon Islamic Studies Initiative (MISI) visiting professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago.

MISI is a three-year project administered by the Divinity School and is designed to bring distinguished visiting scholars to UChicago in order to advance research and enliven conversation about Islamic studies. Each visitor brings to the campus a unique area of expertise, which they share by teaching a class, giving a public lecture and organizing a conference or symposium on their topic of study.

“The whole point is to try to enrich Islamic studies through sharing and exchanging new knowledge in this area,” said Khamis, who holds a Ph.D. in mass media and cultural studies from the University of Manchester in England and is the former head of the Mass Communication and Information Science Department at Qatar University.

Khamis’ course and public lecture will be based on her first co-authored book, “Islam Dot Com: Contemporary Islamic Discourses in Cyerspace” (2009), which is about discourse in cyberspace between Muslims and non-Muslims and how the Internet has changed both political and social discussions among these groups.

While her second book, “Egyptian Revolution 2.0: Political Blogging, Civic Engagement and Citizen Journalism,” published this spring, does not directly focus on Islamic studies, it might come up in the class in the context of new media in the Arab and Muslim worlds, Khamis said.

At the end of the semester she will invite academics, who have written on the topic of digital Islam and Islamic discourses on the Internet, to UChicago to take part in a campus-wide workshop to help engage the campus community as a whole.

Khamis will also use this nomination to further her own research in this topic.

“I am going to try to build on this opportunity,” she said. “By rubbing shoulders and interacting with some of the most renowned scholars in Islamic studies, I will be able to generate new ideas for my own research moving forward.”

Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, MISI is an attempt to create a more seamlessly interdivisional and interdisciplinary context for Islamic studies at UChicago, and to establish a model for academia more broadly.