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Photograph of Mariam Durrani

Mariam Durrani Professorial Lecturer SIS | Peace, Human Rights & Cultural Relations

Contact
Mariam Durrani
SIS | Peace, Human Rights & Cultural Relations
4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Degrees
B.S. Systems Engineering
M.A. English Composition and Rhetoric
Ph.D. Anthropology and Educational Linguistics

Bio
Dr. Mariam Durrani is a decolonial feminist, political anthropologist, and multimodal mediamaker. Her scholarship and advocacy are located at the intersection of global racialization, migration, Muslim youth, higher education, and the geopolitics of war in the US, Pakistan, and online.

She has taught students at multiple higher education institutions in the US and Pakistan, including the University of New Mexico, Hunter College (CUNY), the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, Aga Khan University (Karachi), and the Lahore University of Management Sciences. Dr. Durrani is the current Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Peace, Human Rights, and Cultural Relations.

Dr. Durrani's current book project "The Imperial Optic: Migration, Racialization, and War in US and Pakistani Higher Education," is based on long-term (2013-19) ethnography at a private Pakistani university and a public US college, broadens the scale and scope of how we understand the impact of the imperialism in global higher education. Her work against anti-Muslim discrimination and the War on Terror began in 2001 as a student writer and continues today, including work featured in Teen Vogue, Millennial Politics, Voice of America Urdu(public radio), and Pakistani print and broadcast media.

Her second research, the Roti Collective, is a series of collaborative public & academic engagements about roti and roti-making as a global food culture and history that connects people across south and west Asia, east Africa, across the Caribbean and their diasporas everywhere else. Roti Collective research projects and events think with and about roti as a practice that is connected by histories of colonialism and capitalism, ancestral migration and displacement, gendered expectations including the fetishizations of making “round” rotis with domesticity. For more, please visit www.roticollective.com.
For the Media
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Teaching

Spring 2025

  • CORE-105 Complex Problems Seminar: Muslim Youth Rising

  • SIS-628 Advanced Topics in Int'l Comm: Race in Int'l Relations

  • SISU-205 Intercultural Communication

Fall 2025

  • SIS-642 Intercultural Relations

  • SIS-711 Topics in Intercltr/Int'l Comm: Global Equity and Inclusion