Salah Hassan has been appointed Director of the Global Studies in Arts and Humanities (GSAH) program. This three-year appointment is effective August 16, 2020, to August 15, 2023.
Hassan served as Interim Director of GSAH during the 2019-2020 academic year. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and a core faculty member in the GSAH and Muslim Studies programs.
A humanities education in global studies finds its most powerful meaning by challenging violence and oppression, and by advancing a critique grounded in racial justice, gender equity, and social equality.
Dr. Salah Hassan
“Given the challenges of the moment facing universities in particular and the world more generally, I believe that an education on global issues is more relevant than ever,” Hassan said. “I am enthusiastic about developing initiatives that are supportive of faculty, staff, and students. During my term, I want to emphasize the program’s commitments to anti-racist education and advancing a global justice agenda that speaks directly to student interests and provides opportunities for faculty engagement.
“A humanities education in global studies finds its most powerful meaning by challenging violence and oppression, and by advancing a critique grounded in racial justice, gender equity, and social equality. As a program that critically examines globality, we have a responsibility to cultivate together alternative and oppositional approaches to the status quo as the central feature of our educational mission.”
Research and Publications
Hassan’s areas of research and teaching include postcolonial literature and theory, anticolonial intellectual movements, literatures of empire, and Arab American and Muslim American cultural production. Most recently, his research projects have focused on the representation of Arabs and Muslims in the media and on Arab and Muslim self-representation.
With the support of two grants from the Social Science Research Council, Hassan created the Muslim Subjects website and blog and coordinated the following projects on that site: “Migrations of Islam,” “American Halal,” and “Journal/Islam.”
He co-curated RASHID & ROSETTA, an international online art exhibit on the theme of the Rosetta Stone.He also edited a special issue of Biography, titled “Baleful Postcoloniality;” co-edited with Marcy Newman a special issue of MELUS on Arab American literature; co-produced a short documentary film, titled The Death of an Imam, that focuses on the 2008 FBI shooting of Imam Luqman Abdullah in a Detroit suburb; and produced the feature-length documentary, Migrations of Islam: Muslim American Voices in the 21st Century.
His recent publications include “Radical Revisions: Barbara Harlow and Criticism Beyond Partition” in 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). Hassan currently is completing a book manuscript, tentatively titled Arabs/America: Essays on Race and Representation.
“Professor Salah Hassan has demonstrated outstanding leadership as Acting Interim Director of the Global Studies in the Arts and Humanities program and throughout his tenure as a faculty member in the College of Arts & Letters,” said Christopher P. Long, Dean of the College of Arts & Letters. “He has an excellent record of scholarship and teaching in interdisciplinary global studies and a compelling vision for the program. I am pleased to appoint him as Director of GSAH at MSU.”
Global Studies in Arts and Humanities Program
The Global Studies in Arts and Humanities program 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.
Professor Salah Hassan has demonstrated outstanding leadership as Acting Interim Director of the Global Studies in the Arts and Humanities program and throughout his tenure as a faculty member in the College of Arts & Letters. He has an excellent record of scholarship and teaching in interdisciplinary global studies and a compelling vision for the program.
Christopher P. Long, Dean of the College of Arts & Letters
“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.”
As Director of the GSAH program, Hassan is responsible for building and sustaining the Global Studies in Arts and Humanities major to help ensure that it offers an integrated experience in which courses build onto one another while retaining sufficient flexibility and structure to enable students to navigate successfully through the program. A focus also is to be placed on continuing to carefully support and integrate foreign language experience, study abroad experience, internships, and service learning into the program.
