After receiving a Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Georgetown University in 2017, Heba Arafa Abdelfattah was a visiting assistant professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgia Institute of Technology. She comes to Yale from London, where she has been a research fellow at the Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations. She is currently completing a book manuscript on film, Islam, and modernity in colonial Egypt. At Yale, her project will center on the study of the Arabic genre of “Islamic Hymns” (ibtihalat) as an exemplar of a popular culture approach to study Islam as a lived experience based on the inclusion—not the elimination—of difference.
