Jack G. Shaheen Research Grantees
2024-25
Residential Research Grant Awardee:
Dr. Meenasarani Linde Murugan is a writer and researcher focusing on television, race, popular culture, and diaspora. She has contributed to multiple educational collections for the South Asian American Digital Archive on Asian and Black artists’ historical connections between music, religion, and fashion. She has written on contemporary Asian diasporic pop culture for the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Platform, and contributed to the Articles of Interest podcast. Their recently published essay on South Asian comedy and Netflix appears in The Oxford Handbook of Screen Comedy (ed. William V. Costanzo and Peter C. Kunze, Routledge, 2023). Murugan’s new project examines the relationship between Orientalism and the growth of US empire and television broadcasting between World War II and the 1973-4 Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) Oil Embargo.
Exploratory Grant Awardee:
Juliana Fadil-Luchkiw is an artist and academic whose research involves how dreams and fantasy are embodied in sociocultural life, focusing on cultural exchanges across the Global South, imperialist constructions of otherness and colonial fantasies, transferable racialized aesthetics, and the relationship between dance, sex, and labor. Fadil-Luchkiw is currently a doctoral candidate in the University of California, Berkeley’s department of Theater, Dance, and Performances Studies, completing a dissertation on how Middle Eastern and North African cultural practices and gestures are re-routed through certain forms of Latinidad, with specific emphasis on music, dance, and the figure of the dancing harem girl in the world culture industry. Fadil-Luchkiw has performed and presented artistic work throughout the US and internationally. She has an MA from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and undergraduate degrees (BA & BFA) from The New School.
2019-20
Residential Research Grant Awardees:
Drs. Shirly Bahar (Adjunct Assistant Professor, School of Visual Arts, Columbia University) and Wazhmah Osman (Assistant Professor, Department of Media Studies and Production, Temple University) for “Hollywood’s Best Ally in the Middle East: Place, Identity, and Personality in US-Israeli Television Co-Productions and US-American Adaptations to Israeli Television, 2008-2020.”
Exploratory Grant Awardee:
Alexandra Murray (graduate student, Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies with a concentration in women and gender issues) for research on Arab representation in popular culture and early Hollywood films.
Learn more about the Jack G. Shaheen Research Grants.
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