Postdoctoral Associate, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis (RCHA)
Department of History
Rutgers University
-------------
2022-2024 Postdoctoral Research Associate
Program in African Studies
Princeton University
May Kosba earned her Ph.D. in Historical and Cultural Studies of Religion and an M.A. in Islamic Studies from the Graduate Theological Union (GTU) in Berkeley, California. She recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, contributing to the theme “Black Power and White Supremacy: The Cyclical Dialectics of Power.” Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Program in African Studies at Princeton University.
With over six years of teaching experience, Kosba has designed and taught courses on Islam, race, literature, and identity in Africa and the African diaspora at Princeton and the GTU. Her research and teaching sit at the intersection of Islamic Studies, Literature, and African and African Diaspora Studies, centering Islam’s role in shaping transnational perspectives on race and identity.
Select Publications
“Can (Contemporary) Egyptians Speak?: Articulating Egyptian Arabness and Africanness, Deciphering a Postcolonial (Race) Consciousness,” in Ancient History of Africa volume, edited by Makhroufi Ousmane Traoré, Cambridge University Press. [forthcoming]
- “Becoming Black, (un)Becoming Arab: Affective Geographies and the Search for Identity Beyond Whiteness,” In Centering the Margins: Reimagining Arab American Studies, edited by Danielle Haque and Waleed Mahdi, Texas University Press [forthcoming]
- “Writing Africa for Africans: Du Bois, Egyptian Africanists, and the Encyclopedia Africana Between Dreams and Disruptions.” Arab Studies Journal [forthcoming]
- “Islam and Race in Egypt.” In The Routledge Handbook of Islam and Race, edited by Zain Abdallah, Ch. 24. London: Routledge. December 2024.
- “… And Bid Him Sing: Egyptian Race Consciousness in African Diasporic Memory.” In “Memory, Storytelling and Space,” edited by Mayada Madbouly and Aya Nassar. Special issue, Égypte/Monde arabe 23 (2021): 45–60, https://doi.org/10.4000/ema.14744.
-“Paradoxical Islamophobia and Post-Colonial Cultural Nationalism in Post- Revolutionary Egypt.” In Islamophobia in Muslim Majority Societies, edited by Farid Hafez and Enes Bayraklı, Ch. 7. London: Routledge. February 2019