Justine Howe

Justine Howe specializes in contemporary Islam with a focus on Muslim communities in the United States. She earned a B.A. in History from Williams College, an M.A. in the Anthropology and Sociology of Religion from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Northwestern University. She joined the Department of Religious Studies in Fall 2013 and serves as a Core Research faculty member in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at CWRU.

Her first book, Suburban Islam: Leisure, Authority, and Pluralism after 9/11, is under contract with Oxford University Press. The book examines the role of ritual, leisure, and reading practices in American Muslim “third spaces.” Other forthcoming publications in the Journal of Quranic Studies and the Routledge Handbook of Early Islam analyze the effects of ideologies of religious pluralism on American Muslim communities and scholarship on Islam. She is also at work on a project that focuses on the circulation of Qur’an manuscripts among non-Muslim collectors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her next book will examine the role of college campuses in the making of American Islam. Dr. Howe’s teaching interests include Islam in North America and Europe, the Qur’an, Islamic law, Women and Gender in Islam, and religion and empire.

Dr. Howe has received numerous grants and awards, including her recent selection as a fellow in the Young Scholars in American Religion program at the Center for Religion and American Culture.