Teaching

My teaching philosophy is simple: it is my goal to educate the students I have in the myriad contexts we inhabit. What that means, as a scholar of religion, is that I need students to think, write, and read critically about the very category of “religion,” and how it plays with—historically, globally, contemporarily—categories of “race,” “gender,” “nationality,” and “sexuality.” It also means that I stress universal design, compassion, and flexibility, because I teach students.

I have won and been nominated for multiple teaching awards, most recently the 2020 Kroepsch-Maurice Excellence in Teaching Award and the 2021-2022 College of Arts & Sciences Dean’s Scholar-Teacher Award at UVM.

Because my areas of expertise are Islam, South Asia, and the history of religion, I have developed and taught courses on a wide variety of topics, including Islam, modernity, theory and method in religion, Hindu traditions, race, and empire. I teach students the specific colonial, racialized history of the study of religion. This is my explicit approach to all my courses. I place heavy attention on skills-based learning, which varies based on course level.

While at UVM my teaching and mentoring focuses on the undergraduates I have the privilege to work with, I am actively involved as a mentor of graduate students and junior faculty through my commitments at the American Academy of Religion and via social media spaces. I have both organized and participated in the Study of Islam unit’s mentoring sessions; served on exam and dissertation committees; and seek opportunities to help up-and-coming scholars whenever possible.