Dr. Diana Coleman is a scholar of religion, specializing in contemporary Islam. She has regional expertise in Islam in Southeast Asia and North Africa, and within minority communities in Germany, England, and France. Dr. Coleman worked at the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University for six years, where she was part of 5 year, 5-million-dollar international multi-sited and transdisciplinary grant project. She contributed to the Guantanamo Public Memory Project, teaching, and working with graduate students in Public History at Arizona State University. She created an “Unethical Soundscape” of Guantanamo for the installation and public event at the Phoenix Public Library and presented her research as part of a panel of legal and subject experts at the associated public events. Her research foci include religion, militarization, carceral spaces, and violence within the context of Guantanamo Bay Prison specifically and the Global War on Terror more generally. Her chapter “The Amen Temple of Empire” was published in Guantanamo and American Empire: The Humanities Respond in 2017. Her article “On the Phobia of Hope and Everything After” was published in a special volume of Sargasso: The Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language, and Culture titled “Guantanamo: What’s Next?” in 2019.  Her article “El Sur También Existe” was also published in 2019 in Cultural Dynamics for a special issue: “Epistemologies of Militarization in the Global South.” Dr. Coleman was part of two webinars in 2020 organized by Human Rights Media during which she addressed “Human Rights and Militarism” and “Guantanamo Prisoners.” She most recently presented “Righteousness, Resentment, and Religion in this Time of Plague” at the 2021 AAR Western Region Annual Meeting.  Dr. Coleman will be presenting at the 7th World Parliament of Science, Religion, and Philosophy organized by MIT World Peace University in Pune, India in October 2021 and at the “Camps, (In)justice, and Solidarity in the Americas” Commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camps hosted by University of Graz in Austria in January 2022. Her manuscript Guantanamo: The Amen Temple of Empire is under revision. She is organizing the November 2021 screening of the award winning documentary “A Reckoning in Boston” followed by “A Conversation with the Filmmakers” co-sponsored by CAL and the Martin Springer Institute. Deeply committed to her work with undergraduate students, Dr. Coleman teaches courses in Comparative Religion and in the Humanities, including Religions of the World, What is Religion?, Introductory courses on Islam and Christianity, Religion and Society, World Perspectives on the Humanities, Western Perspectives on the Humanities, and Women in American Arts and Culture. She currently serves as internship coordinator for the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies and chairs the University Undergraduate Committee.
Supervisors: Shahla Talebi, Tracy Fessenden, and Martin Beck Matustik