Leadership and Staff

The Center of Muslim Experience in the United States is co-directed by Dr. Yasmin Saikia (Hardt-Nickachos Chair in Peace Studies and Professor of History) and Dr. Chad Haines (Associate Professor of Religious Studies). Since moving to ASU in 2010, they have developed a number of joint projects in peace studies, the study of Muslims and South Asian studies.

Together, they have co-edited three volumes in Peace Studies: "Women and Peace in the Islamic World," "People’s Peace," and "On Othering: Processes and Politics of Unpeace." They also developed a number of projects to provide professional development to scholars in South Asia, including two major grants from the U.S. Department of State creating partnerships with the University of Punjab and Kinnaird College, both located in Lahore, Pakistan. In addition, they conduct joint workshops at universities across South Asia, including Aligarh Muslim University, the University of Science and Technology (Meghalaya), Jamia Millia Islamia University (New Delhi), Forman Christian College (Lahore), Lahore University of Management Sciences and Karachi University.

They are currently involved in a major, three-year, joint research project funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities, to research and co-author a book on Minorities and Belonging in South Asia.
 

Yasmin Saikia is a historian, earning her PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and having studied at Aligarh Muslim University earlier. She has published three books and numerous edited volumes along with over three dozen peer-reviewed articles and essays. Two of her award-winning books are "Fragmented Memory: Struggling to be Tai-Ahom in India" (2005) and "Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971" (2010). Besides the trilogy on "People’s Peace" she co-edited "Sayyid Ahmad Khan Cambridge Companion" and "Northeast India: A Place of Relations."

Her scholarly lens is focused on the history of Muslim communities in South Asia with thematic specialization on memory and identity; women, war and peace; contemporary South Asia (India, Pakistan and Bangladesh); and Islamic ethics and values of peace. 

Chad Haines is a cultural anthropologist, also having earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of "Nation, Territory, and Globalization in Pakistan" and is currently working on a second book tentatively titled "Muslim Pathways: Urbanism, Modernity, and Everyday Islamic Ethics in Cairo, Islamabad, and Dubai." Chad has been awarded research grants from the National Endowment for Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies. Before moving to ASU, he was an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University in Cairo and earlier served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali.

His scholarly concerns focus on Islamophobia, postcolonial nation-building and the mapping of marginal communities, the politics of geographical space and territory in South Asia, urban cultures and the making of modern Muslim identities and Islamic values and everyday ethics of neighborliness and hospitality.