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Biography

Dr. Mohamed Abdou graduated from Queen’s University with a Doctorate in Cultural Studies and holds an BAH/MA in Sociology. Starting Spring 2024, he will be the Arcapita Visiting Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s Middle-Eastern, South Asian and African Studies (MESAAS) Program at the Middle-East Institute. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University’s Einaudi Center’s Racial Justice Program and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the American University of Cairo. He is an interdisciplinary scholar of Indigenous, Black, critical race, and Islamic studies, as well as anti-racist feminist, gender, sexuality, women, decolonial and post-colonial studies with extensive fieldwork experience in the Middle East-North Africa and Turtle Island. He is a self-identifying Muslim anarchist and diasporic settler of color. While at Cornell, he was living on Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫʼ, Haudenosaunee territory. While lecturing and organizing at Columbia U in New York City (NYC) he will be on the ancestral and traditional homelands of the Lenni-Lenape and Wappinger peoples. He has taught (under) graduate courses on Settler-colonialism, Abolition, Anti-Colonialism, and Anti-Imperialism, Intimacy, Family & Kinships, North African, Islamic, BIPOC, queer-feminist, and radical newest social movements, as well as on overarching subjects as Research Methodologies, the Global Political Economy of Development, (Pre-) Modern/Classical and Poststructuralist Political Philosophy and Social Theory at the American University of Cairo, as well as Cornell and Queen’s University. He has also taught a course on Indigenous Land Education and Black Geographies at the University of Toronto-OISE-SJE. He is author of the book Islam and Anarchism: Relationships and Resonances (Pluto Press, 2022). He wrote his transnational ethnographic and historical-archival Ph.D. on Islam & Queer-Muslims: Identity & Sexuality in the Contemporary. It investigates the inseparability of studies of race from religion and gender from sexuality. His current project examines how spiritual orientations/practices can inform non-racial conceptualizations of indigeneity and troubles current decolonial social movements that are animated by secular anti-global and anti-Capitalist aspirations. His research stems from his organizing towards BIPOC and Palestinian liberation and involvement with post-anti-Globalization Seattle 1999 movements, some of which include the Tyendinaga Mohawks and the sister territories of Kahnawake, Akwesasne, and Kanehsatake, during the standoff over the Culbertson Tract, as well as the anti-War protests of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Indigenous Zapatista movement in Chiapas, and the 2011 Egyptian ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings.