People

 Yasmin Saikia is a Professor of History and is the first holder of the distinguished Hardt-Nickachos Endowed Chair in Peace Studies at Arizona State University. She is the co-director of the Center of Muslim Experience in the US (CME-US), established at Arizona State University in 2022. Yasmin Saikia has authored several monographs, edited volumes, and numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. Her book, Fragmented Memories: Struggling to be Tai-Ahom in India won the Srikanta Datta Book Prize from the Nehru Memorial, India, in 2005, and Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 won the US Oral History Association Biennial Award in 2013. Her most recent publication is On Othering: Politics and Processes of Unpeace (2024), co-edited with Chad Haines. Yasmin Saikia’s scholarship has been supported by several prestigious fellowships, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright Foundation, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, Social Sciences Research Council, and the American Institutes of Indian, Bangladesh, and Pakistan Studies. She is the editor-in-chief for Cambridge University Press’s new series ‘Muslim South Asia’, serves on several editorial boards, and is the President of the South Asian Muslim Studies Association (SAMSA). Yasmin Saikia hails from Assam, India. 

 Megan Eaton Robb is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies whose teaching and research focus on South Asian religions, Islam, and gender. She is the author of Print and the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life (Oxford University Press, 2020), which explores Muslim identity formation and Urdu journalism in colonial India. Her current project, Becoming Elizabeth: Gender, Religion, and Empire in the 18th Century, examines cross-cultural identity and transformation in the Mughal and British worlds.

She is also the co-editor of Muslims Against the Muslim League: Critiques of the Idea of Pakistan (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and has published in Modern Asian Studies, the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, and the American Historical Review. Dr. Robb is a Senior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography, where she also serves on the Council and chairs the Programming Committee. Megan serves as the Vice-President of SAMSA.

 Jaclyn Michael is an Associate Professor of Asian Religions at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and serves as SAMSA’s Social Media Coordinator. A scholar of Islam, her research explores contemporary Indian Muslim identity, belonging, and representation through public cultures of performance. Her work spans global Islamic studies, Asian religions, South Asian literatures and cultures, and performance studies, with a focus on how acts of representation shape understandings of religious identity and community.

Dr. Michael’s recent publications include essays in ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies, International Journal of Islam in Asia, and Bloomsbury Handbook of Muslims and Popular Culture. She teaches courses on Islamic traditions, gender and sexuality in religion, the Qur’an, and religions of South and East Asia.

She holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, an MA from Boston University, and an ALB from Harvard University.