Assistant Professor
Specialization:
Ph.D., Rutgers University - New Brunswick, Women’s and Gender Studies
Arab American and Muslim American studies; Feminist and gender studies; South-West Asian and North African (SWANA) diasporas and cultural studies; Surveillance and policing; Critical refugee and migration studies; Critical militarism studies; Disability studies; Anthropology of Islam and secularism.
Bio:
Amir Mohamed Aziz (أمير محمّد عزيز) is Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Professor Aziz conducts research and offers courses on Arab Americans and Muslim Americans, South-West Asian and North African (SWANA) American diasporas and cultures, Critical militarism studies, Disability studies, Asian American feminist and gender studies, and Surveillance and migration.
Professor Aziz’s research is broadly concerned with the politics of migration, racialization, and social movements within Arab, Palestinian, South/West Asian, and Muslim communities in the United States and the diasporas, tracing how liberal-carceral forms of surveillance, racial necropower, demonization, and anti-Muslim racisms targeting those communities have had longstanding roots in U.S. liberalism and settler empire long before the ‘War on Terror.’
In particular, Professor Aziz’s scholarship attends to how the so-called promise of secular-liberal inclusion - under the ideological umbrella of secularism, universalism, and liberalism - has completely and profoundly failed Muslims, among other minoritized groups, in the ‘Global North.’ Anti-Muslim and anti-Arab rhetoric and hate crimes continue to grow globally, legitimated by waves of anti-terrorism, anti-veil, and so-called freedom of speech laws and policies that ostracize Muslims and Arabs (or those approximated as such) as the ‘terrorist’, misogynist Other most dangerously resistant to secular-liberal modernity and sexual and gender progressivity – a rendering that exposes secular-liberal norms of gender, sexuality, and religion that suffuse modern social life. Professor Aziz’s work thinks through racialization, secularism, and liberalism in tandem as modalities of power that have shaped how we have come to think of politics, culture, and subjectivity in the United States and beyond.
Professor Aziz is working on a first book manuscript, tentatively titled When They Come For Us: FBI Surveillance and Federal Informants in Muslim America, that investigates the decades-long history of federal informant and intelligence programs in the United States that have attempted to recruit Arab, Muslim, South Asian, and South-West Asian and North African (SWANA) migrants and refugees as ‘counter-terrorism’ informants to spy on their own communities. Despite how cases like Hassan v. City of New York and FBI v. Fazaga have attempted to end such suspicionless surveillance and informant recruitment, those practices remain informally authorized by domestic intelligence and security agencies.
Professor Aziz’s manuscript is grounded in over seven years of ethnographic field research and community work in Arab, Muslim, and South-West Asian and North African communities across south/central Texas, New Jersey, New York, and southern California. Professor Aziz’s research has been supported by the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, the University of California, Berkeley’s Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute.
Professor Aziz has engaged in scholarship, teaching, and public education work that have supported immigrant, first-generation, and non-traditional students, with a focus on countering ableist norms and providing support for students with disabilities in higher education. In 2023, Professor Aziz was selected for the Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education award by Rutgers University’s School of Arts and Sciences in recognition of teaching excellence and outstanding pedagogical innovation.
Apart from research and teaching, Professor Aziz wears another hat as a documentary filmmaker and is currently directing a feature-length documentary, LAKHDAR. Set in the French Riviera, LAKHDAR tells the powerful story of Lakhdar Boumediène, an Algerian man who was wrongfully detained and tortured at Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp for seven long years. The film follows Lakhdar in Nice, France as he navigates his life after winning the historic Boumediène v. Bush Supreme Court case. The film is supported by the International Documentary Association.
Professor Aziz is a recipient of the 2025 AXS Film Fund award that supports contemporary creative works by BIPOC artists and filmmakers with disabilities. Professor Aziz’s writings and cultural commentary can also be found in various media outlets and magazines such as the Middle East Research and Information Project, Jadaliyya, and Africa Is a Country.
Professor Aziz is Faculty Affiliate of the UCSB Center for Middle East Studies.
Selected Publications:
Academic Publications: Journal Articles and Book Chapters
Amir Aziz. 2025. “I Am the Price of Your Freedom: Gender, Islam, and Cyber-Harassment in the Aftermath of France’s Affaire Mila.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 32(3): 276-291.
Amir Aziz. 2024. “Marseille in Uproar: Secularism, Multiculturalism, and Urban Degradation in the City of Immigrants.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power: 1-20.
Amir Aziz. 2019. “Protesting Politics in Algeria.” Middle East Research & Information Project.
Amir Aziz. 2018. “Rewriting Algeria: Transcultural Kinship and Anticolonial Revolution in Kateb Yacine’s L’Homme aux sandales de caoutchouc.” In Art, Creativity, and Politics in Africa and the Diaspora, Abimbola Adelakun and Toyin Falola, eds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 15-45.
Media Articles and Cultural Commentary
Amir Aziz. 2021. “On Islamophobia, Anti-Terrorism Securitization, and Secularism.” Jadaliyya.
Amir Aziz. 2019. “The South of Algeria has something to say.” Africa Is a Country.
Radio interview with Bill Fletcher on the 2019 Algerian revolution protests. Arise! with Bill Fletcher. WPFW. July 5, 2019.
Course Offerings:
AS AM 100JJ: Arab and Muslim Americans: Roots, Representation, Resistance
AS AM 135: Asian American QT Issues
AS AM 164: The Politics of the Global War on Terror
AS AM 183: Critical Approaches to War and Empire