Salah D. Hassan will serve as Interim Director of Global Studies in the Arts and Humanities (GSAH) for the 2019-2020 academic year. Hassan is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and a core faculty member in the Muslim Studies program and the Global Studies in the Arts and Humanities program.
“Global Studies in the Arts and Humanities is a unique academic program that offers an interdisciplinary education focused on the cultural complexities of an increasingly interconnected world,” Hassan said. “Our arts and humanities courses stress the importance of analyzing creative and intellectual responses to globalization.”
GSAH reasserts the central place of literary and film studies, art and art history, language study and religious studies, performing arts and philosophy in the shaping of global cultural trends. GSAH courses provide an advanced interdisciplinary humanities education focused on creative and intellectual expression within a global frame. The program emphasizes a deeper understanding of the complexity of the global past by equipping students with the skills to understand and explain the emerging cultural forms of our global present. GSAH develops students analytical thinking, intercultural understanding, group problem solving, language proficiency, and global awareness – skills that are in high demand in our increasingly globalized world.
Over the next year, as Interim Director of GSAH, I will work with faculty and students to advance MSU’s commitment to interdisciplinary and international studies in the arts and humanities.
“GSAH faculty and students critically assess the gains and losses resulting from globalization that find expression in a range of cultural forms, from language, literature, film, religion, and visual art to performance, popular culture, and social media,” Hassan said. “Over the next year, as Interim Director of GSAH, I will work with faculty and students to advance MSU’s commitment to interdisciplinary and international studies in the arts and humanities.”
As a core faculty member in GSAH and the Muslim Studies program, Hassan teaches courses that focus on literatures of empire, anticolonial intellectual movements, and Arab American and Muslim American cultural production. He is the editor of a special issue of Biography, titled “Baleful Postcoloniality,” and co-editor with Marcy Newman of a special issue of MELUS on Arab American literature. He was the associate editor of The New Centennial Review and edited several special issues with the following titles: “The Origins of Postmodern Cuba,” “Terror Wars,” “Cultures of Occupation,” and “The Palestine Issue.”
With the support of two grants from the Social Science Research Council, Hassan founded the Muslim Subjects online project (2010-2017), co-produced a short documentary titled “Death of an Imam” (2010) that focuses on the 2008 FBI shooting of Imam Luqman Abdullah in a Detroit suburb, and produced the feature-length documentary film Migrations of Islam: Muslim American Voices in the 21st Century (2015). His recent publications include “Radical Revisions: Barbara Harlow and Criticism Beyond Partition” (Race & Class January-March 2019); “Mapping anti-Muslim Politics in the U.S.” in Muslims and Contemporary US Politics, edited by Mohammad Khalil (2019); and a revised reprint of “Passing Away: Despair, Eulogies, and Millennial Palestine” in The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East edited by Karim Mattar and Anna Ball (2019). He currently is completing a book manuscript tentatively titled Arabs/America: Essays on Race and Representation.
