This seminar is an interrogation into the contemporary academic study of Muslims. It will survey key texts from a broad range of fields, from transnational American studies to anthropology, to explore methodological and theoretical questions of this burgeoning interdisciplinary formation. What is the “critical” in critical Muslim studies and what are the stakes in naming it (or refusing it) as a field of study? What and who is “the Muslim” (religious subject? racial category? historic location of subjection and surveillance?) What theoretical frameworks are employed to analyze the Muslim experience and what is the impact of these intellectual projects on the academy, and Muslims themselves? What different methodologies are used and what kinds of knowledges do they yield? Importantly, as Muslims and those that study them are subjects of the world, this course will necessarily approach this topic by keeping in tandem the ways critical Muslim studies is shaped by and may find itself complicit with white supremacy, settler colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, patriarchy and the war on terror. Accordingly, students will leave this course with a strong command of a specific field of study along with the capacity for meaningful comparative analysis.