2017-18 Diversity Scholars Cohort

Shehnaz was a 2017-2018 scholar in the Women and Gender Studies Department. During her time at Ithaca, she taught Islamic Feminism one semester and Gender and Sexuality in the Middle East in the other. She graduated from Emory University with a bachelor’s in Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies and earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin.

Shehnaz has been teaching at Mercer University since fall 2018 as an assistant professor in the Religion department, specializing in Islam. She teaches the following courses regularly: Introduction to World Religions; Abrahamic Religions; Western Religions; Islam and Gender; Islamophobia; Introduction to Islam. Her interests generally include religious authority, lived religion, religion and feminism, and change and tradition. Her first book is forthcoming with Oneworld Academic, scheduled for publication in September 2024. It explores the issue of the negotiables and non-negotiables in Islam, using ethnographic methods and textual sources on Islam.

Currently, Shehnaz is working on her second book, which is a study of Muslim women’s marriage to non-Muslims. A journal article based on my textual research on this topic was published with Journal of Qur’anic Studies, available on her Academia.edu profile.

Raul was a scholar during the 2017-2018 academic year for the Writing Department. Raul remained at Ithaca College and taught various writing courses. He is currently an Assoicate Dean in the School of Humanities and Sciences.

He is the author of "A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens" (forthcoming from Dutton), and "In This World of Ultraviolet Light" (winner of the 2021 Don Belton Prize and forthcoming from Indiana University Press). He earned his Ph.D. in English at the University of Nebraska, with a specialization in ethnic studies. He was awarded a dissertation fellowship through Ithaca College’s diversity scholars' program, which he used to complete his dissertation Manteca, a novel set in 1980s Miami in the shadow of Mariel and the killing of Arthur McDuffie by a Latino police officer.

Palma is a member of the fiction faculty. His research and teaching interests include creative writing studies, creative writing pedagogy, and composition studies, with a leaning toward topics in LatinX studies, women and gender studies, narratology, and transnationalism. Most recently, he has turned his attention to decolonizing the syllabus and the work that takes place in the creative writing classroom. In class, craft and creative writing lore are sites of excavation; he uses critical theory to see the situational factors that give rise to craft.

His work has also appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Chattahoochee Review, The Greensboro Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Smokelong Quarterly, and The Sonora Review. The first chapter of his novel Manteca was distinguished/notable in Best American Short Stories (edited by Junot Diaz), and his short fiction was included in Best Small Fictions 2018 (selected by Aimee bender). His work has been supported with fellowships and scholarships from the CubaOne Foundation, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, the Santa Fe Writer's Conference, Sewanee Writer's Conference, and Sundress Academy for the Arts.