CSWGS was delighted to honor English PhD student and CSWGS Graduate Certificate student Zainab Abdali with the 2022 Seth Balkishan Das Singhal Award for her paper entitled “Self-Rooted Belonging and ‘Pleasing Dislocations:’ Feminist Reimaginings of Home in Shahzia Sikander’s Work.”

She graduated with her B.A. in English & Textual Studies and Mathematics from Syracuse University in 2018, after which she taught ninth-grade English at the Nairobi Muslim Academy in Nairobi, Kenya through a Fulbright grant in 2019. At Rice, her research interests include Muslim American and global Muslim literatures, representations of the War on Terror and the figure of the terrorist in popular culture, and women of color feminist theory. She was also a 2021 Clancy Taylor Summer Public Humanities Intern for Dr. Krista Comer’s book project, Living West as Feminists, an interview project focusing on feminist scholars and their relationship to place and land, especially in the US West.