Faculty Appointments 2023-24

“I wish RPL was here when I was a student, and I hope to have a fraction of the impact on these students that my teachers and mentors had on me.” 

Hussein Rashid, MTS ’98, GSAS ’10, joined Harvard Divinity School as the assistant dean for Religion and Public Life in August 2023. Before this, he worked at The New School, where he earned a distinguished teaching award in 2023. Concurrently, he was the project director of Arts of Devotion at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, supported by the Lilly Foundation. His other museum experiences include serving as the lead content consultant for the Children’s Museum of Manhattan’s exhibition, America to Zanzibar: Muslim Cultures Near and Far, and as an advisor for the Museum of the City of New York’s exhibition, City of Faith: Religion, Activism, and Urban Space. 

He is the executive producer of the Wilbur Award-winning New York Times op-doc, The Secret History of Muslims in the US, and is currently working on a multi-part documentary on the history of Muslims in the US. Additionally, he was a content consultant on the Pulitzer Prize-winning opera, Omar. He has also written the education guide for the POV documentary, An Act of Worship. Academically, he co-edited the volumes Ms. Marvel’s America: No Normal, about the first female Muslim superhero to have her own series in Marvel Comics, and Teaching Critical Religious Studies: Pedagogy and Critique in the Classroom. Furthermore, he has authored dozens of book chapters and articles covering a range of topics, including intra-Muslim racism, religion in museums, the role of the arts in society, Muslims in film, and Malcolm X in qawwali. 

While at HDS, two more of his co-edited books have been published: Islam in North America: An Introduction and The Bloomsbury Handbook of Muslims and Popular Culture. In these publications, Rashid employs the RPL methodology to consider internal diversity, change over time, cultural peace, and moral imagination.