Join the University of Michigan Global Islamic Studies Center (GISC) on November 19, 2025 at 5:00PM at UMMA Multipurpose Room for a conversation with Dr. Ken Chitwood on his new book “Borícua Muslims: Everyday Cosmopolitanism among Puerto Rican Converts to Islam.” 

Drawing on years of ethnographic research and more than a hundred interviews conducted in Puerto Rico, New York, Florida, Texas, New Jersey, and online, Ken Chitwood tells the story of Puerto Rican Muslims as they construct a shared sense of peoplehood through everyday practices and historical reimaginings that complicate ideas about race, ethnicity, and religion in the Americas. Expanding the geography of global Islam and recasting the relationship between religion and Puerto Rican culture, “Borícua Muslims” reckons with the many entanglements of Latinx and Muslim identities amid late-modern globalization.

Joining us in conversation with Dr. Ken Chitwood will be University of Michigan professors Dr. Sara Awartani, Dr. Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, and Dr. Aliyah Khan (moderator). 

Please note that the museum closes at 5:00PM and the galleries will be closed at the time of the event. If you would like to tour the museum, please make sure to arrive before 5:00PM. Entry to the museum and the event are both free.

For event attendees and affiliates, the University of Texas Press offers the code UTXGISC for 40% off all formats (print or electronic) of the book Borícua Muslims on the publisher website now through the end of November (Nov. 30, 2025).

Meet the speakers:

Dr. Ken Chitwood is a postdoctoral researcher pursuing Habilitation with the Department for the Study of Religion at Universität Bayreuth. He is also an Affiliate Researcher with the University of Southern California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture. His first monograph, “The Muslims of Latin America and the Caribbean” (2021) won the Religion News Association’s Best Nonfiction Book Award. His second book,” Borícua Muslims: The Everyday Lives of Puerto Rican Converts to Islam” is out now with the University of Texas Press (2025); and his third book, the edited anthology “Engaged Spirituality: Stories of Religious Inspiration, Resilience, and Work for the Common Good,” is due out with Bloomsbury (2026). Dr. Chitwood’s academic work focuses on Islam and religion in the Americas, Latinx Muslims, Christian-Muslim relations, global Christianity, Muslim minorities, and ethnographic methods and manifestations of religion-beyond-religion in a global and digital age. He is also a working journalist; an editor of ReligionLink, a premier resource for journalists reporting on religion; and current president of the Religion News Association (RNA). 

Dr. Sara Awartani is an interdisciplinary historian at the University of Michigan whose research, publications, and teaching focuses on twentieth-century U.S. social movements, interracial solidarities, policing, and American global power, with special attention to Latinx and Arab American histories. Her first book project, “Solidarities of Liberation, Visions of Empire: Puerto Rico, Palestine, and American Global Power” (under contract), chronicles a globally expansive story of Palestine liberation, Puerto Rican radicalism, and the United States' efforts to weaponize and police those freedom dreams. Dr. Awartani's research appears in a variety of peer-reviewed and public-facing forums, including Radical History Review; Kalfou: A Comparative Ethnic Studies Journal; Society & Space; Middle East Report; and” Critical Dialogues in Latinx Studies: A Reader.” Her research has received support across subfields, including the Puerto Rican Studies Association and the Arab American National Museum, with additional recognition by the Ford Foundation and the Latin American Studies Association. 

Dr. Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes is Professor of American Culture, Romance Languages and Literatures, and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is author of “Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora” (2009) and “Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance” (2021). His books of fiction include “Uñas pintadas de azul/Blue Fingernails” (2005) and “Abolición del pato” (2015). He appears as Lola von Miramar in the YouTube series “Cooking with Drag Queens.”

Dr. Aliyah Khan (moderator) is Director of the Global Islamic Studies Center (GISC), and Associate Professor of English, and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She specializes academically in postcolonial Caribbean and Muslim literatures, and she has also published creative nonfiction in “Guernica” and various anthologies. Dr. Khan’s award-winning book “Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean” (2020), is the first scholarly monograph on the comparative history, literature, and music of enslaved African Muslims and indentured Indian Muslims in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica. Her interviews have appeared in and on NPR, the Washington Post, Times of India, Sky TV (UK), NCN Guyana Broadcasting, Bayt al Fann, and other venues.

This event is brought to you by the Global Islamic Studies Center and cosponsored at U-M by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACS), the Islamophobia Working Group (IWG), the Arab and Muslim American Studies (AMAS) Program in American Culture, the Latina/o Studies Program in American Culture, and the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures (RLL).