Aliyah Khan

Aliyah Khan is Associate Professor of Caribbean Literature in the Department of English and the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. She is also a board member of the Arab and Muslim American Studies Program in the Department of American Culture. Dr. Khan received her 2012 Ph.D. in literature and feminist studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and also holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Fiction) from Hunter College of the City University of New York. She is a recipient of the 2017-18 American Association of University Women (AAUW) Postdoctoral Research Leave Fellowship, and the 2018-2019 American Comparative Literature Association Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Award. Dr. Khan is a native of Guyana and New York City.

Recent Publications:

“Protest and Punishment: Indo-Guyanese Women and Organized Labour.” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies 12 (2018): 269-298.

“Voyages Across Indenture: From Ship Sister to Mannish Woman.” GLQ 22.2 (2016): 249-80.

 “Indigeneity and the Indo-Caribbean in Cyril Dabydeen’s Dark Swirl.” Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne 40.1 (2015): 205-26.

Current Work:

Dr. Khan's first book Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean (Rutgers University Press 2020), is the first literary studies monograph on Islam and Muslims in Caribbean discourse and national imaginaries. The book focuses on 19th-21st-century Indo- and Afro-Caribbean Muslim communities in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica. Dr. Khan is also conducting research for a second project on Caribbean hurricanes and the ship routes of the transatlantic slave trade, and their implications for contemporary migration within the hemispheric Americas.

Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean at Rutgers University Press

Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean on Amazon