People

Center Manager and Summer School Coordinator

Jose Vizcaíno is the Director of the Centro de Estudios Diálogo Global and specializes in Cultural Studies and Migration Studies.

Program Director

Roberto D. Hernández, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies
and Associated Faculty of the Center for Islamic and Arabic Studies at San Diego State University.

Previous Summer School Faculty



Hatem Bazian is a Senior Lecturer of Near Eastern Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley where he teaches courses on Islamic law and society, Islam in America, religious studies, and Middle Eastern studies. In addition to Berkeley, Dr. Bazian is a visiting professor in Religious Studies at Saint Mary's College of California and adviser to the Religion, Politics and Globalization Center at UC Berkeley and Zaytuna Institute.

Houria Bouteldja is a Founder and Spokesperson of the Parti des Indigènes de la Republique (previously the Mouvement des Indigènes de la Republique) in France. She has recently been threatened by the French Right, accused of being an anti-white racist for her political work addressing the continuation of "post-colonial colonialism" in France.

Ramon Grosfóguel is an Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California Berkeley, USA.

E-mail:

Arzu Merali is a mother, writer and activist. . She is one of the founders of the Islamic Human Rights Commission (http://www.ihrc.org.uk) based in London, UK, where she lives.

Salman Sayyid is Director of the Center for Muslim and Non-Muslim Understanding at the University of South Australia at Adelaide. He is also the author of A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism, London, Zed Books, 2003. (More Info on Book)






Sirin Adlbi Sibai is a Spanish-Syrian researcher and activist. She received her Ph.D. in International Mediterranean Studies at the Autonomous University of Madrid with a thesis titled, Coloniality, women, feminism and Islam: Construction and deconstruction of "the Muslim woman”. She is currently a researcher in a project titled "Women in transition and transformation of gender identity in migration processes," financed by the Institute for Women and the Ministry of Health, Social Policy and Equality in the CSIC-Madrid. Her research interests include: the construction of Islamophobia in international relations; Muslim and Arab women's movements; Islam, gender, feminism and coloniality; Gender, development and coloniality; postcolonial, decolonial studies and Islam.


Blog: http://masdeunavoz.blogspot.com.es/

Mukhtar H. Ali earned a PhD in Islamic mysticism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is an accomplished translator of several important texts and will be joining the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London as a Research Associate in October of 2012.

Samia Bano teaches in the School of Law at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. Her work focuses on Islamic Family Law, Women's Human Rights and Legal Pluralism.

Asma Barlas is an academic educated in Pakistan and the United States. She is the Director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity of the Department of Politics at Ithaca College, New York. Her specialties include comparative and international politics, Islam and Qur'anic hermeneutics, and women and gender. Among her many publications is the book titled,"Believing Women" in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002).

Farid Esack is a Muslim Liberation Theologian and Professor in the Study of Islam at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. He previously served as Commissioner for Gender Equality in South African and has taught at a number of universities across the globe including Harvard, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Gadjah Mada (Yogjakarta) and Xavier University in Cincinnati. He is a former President of the International Qur’anic Studies Association and Chairperson of Boycott Divestment and Sanctions-South Africa.

Nadia Fadil is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. Her research interests revolve around questions of subjectivity and embodiment, secular governmentality, liberalism and multiculturalism focused on the presence of Muslims in Europe.

Abdennur Prado is the President of the Junta Islámica Catalana, and organizer of the bi-annual Congreso Internacional de Feminismo Islámico. He is the author of many books and articles on contemporary Islamic questions, many which can be found on his blog

Nelson Maldonado-Torres is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and the Department of Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. He is also a recent past President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association and author of Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.

Thomas Reifer is Associate Professor of Sociology and an Affiliated Faculty of Ethnic Studies at the University of San Diego where he is also a member of the Advisory Committee of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice. He is also an Associate Fellow at the Transnational Institute, a worldwide fellowship of committed scholar-activists where he regularly publishes on pressing social issues.

Santiago Slabodsky is Florence and Kaufman Chair in Jewish Studies at Hofstra University, New York. He is an Argentinean scholar trained in Jewish, Liberationist and Decolonial philosophies, who has also been active in a developing inter-religious Christian-Muslim-Jewish activist-intellectual networks.

Jasmin Zine is Professor of Sociology and Muslim Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. She is an affiliated faculty member with the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project (IRDP) at U.C. Berkeley, California.