Rose Deighton-MohammedAssistant Teaching Professor

Rose Deighton-Mohammed is a scholar of religion, gender, and public humanities. She completed her PhD in West and South Asian Religions at Emory University in 2021. Her research stands at the intersection of Islamic Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Sufi Studies, and Arabic Literature. Her current work explores community-driven efforts to identify and prevent spiritual abuse among North American Muslims. She is currently writing a book called “Sufism and Gender: How Embodied Feminist Pedagogy Transforms a Tradition.” Her book explores how modern Sufis are redefining spiritual training, teaching pedagogy, and community dynamics because of their commitments to trauma-informed care, gender justice, and anti-oppressive social values. Deighton-Mohammed’s research publications can be accessed in the Journal of Islamic Ethics, Religion Compass, and Body and Religion.

As a public humanities scholar, Deighton-Mohammed engages in collaborative research and scholarship with humanists off-campus. Her goals are to connect the classroom to the local community and expand our understanding of what academic scholarship can look like. This work is rooted in the belief that the most valuable knowledge is created in community. Many of Deighton-Mohammed’s classes are community-engaged and emphasize experiential learning, collaborative project-based work, and self-reflection practices. She regularly teaches courses in collaboration with community partners such as the Atlanta-based feminist bookstore and non-profit Charis Books/Charis Circle and Decatur's Little Shop of Stories. 

Deighton-Mohammed is the Director of the Emory LINC Initiative (Learning through Inclusive Collaboration), which is funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In this capacity, she helps Emory faculty from the humanities, social sciences, and sciences design interdisciplinary courses linking their individual classes around a variety of topics.

Research Interests

Sufism, Religion and Abuse, Islamic Feminist Thought, Public Humanities, Community-Engaged Pedagogy.

Fall 2023

•  IDS 216-W Visual Culture We live in a culture that is saturated by visual images. Thus, it is vital to understand what forces shape visual culture and how it shapes our thinking about myriad topics such as politics, race, class, and gender. In this class we will explore the ways visual culture is produced, circulated, and consumed through a case study of visual representations of Islam and Muslims. We will cultivate the requisite historical and theoretical knowledge to unpack and analyze visual images of Islam and Muslims from a variety of contexts. Students will explore visual culture in multiple mediums including art, architecture, photography, comics, digital media, advertising, and television.
  
  
•  IDS 190: Freshman Seminar, The Power of Storytelling Human beings are storytellers – whether of great myths and legends, heart wrenching dramas or heartwarming comedies, we all tell stories all the time. Stories connect us, transform us, and allow us to express our deepest understanding of ourselves and the world we live in. In this seminar, we will explore the world of stories – stories we tell about ourselves, stories we listen to told by the people around us, and stories we are surrounded by in our culture. Through scholarly reading and group project, we will learn what stories are and what they mean, how stories bring people together and tear them apart, and how we can all become more effective communicators by learning to tell our story.