Dr. Najwa Mayer joined UC Davis in Fall 2025 as an Assistant Professor in Asian American Studies as well as affiliate faculty in the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program and the Cultural Studies Graduate Group. She holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. 

Najwa’s areas of research and writing are broadly concerned with culture, capital, and social movements across Muslim and Asian diasporas; US empire and South/West Asia-US relations; critical refugee and critical militarism studies; Islam in the US; race and liberalism; and transnational feminisms.

 She is working on two book projects: The first examines the unprecedented proliferation of “Muslim American” popular cultures within 21st-century War on Terror markets, theorizing their circulations—from counterextremism policing to social movements—through neoliberal relations between racial, sexual, and secular politics. The second traces the transcontinental supply chains of the War on Terror by following the geo-capitalist relationships between weapons, art, and refugee labor. Her research has received support from the Social Science Research Council, Andrew Mellon Foundation, and Henry Luce Foundation, among others.

 Najwa was formerly a Society of Fellows postdoctoral scholar at Boston University (affiliations in Religion and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College (affiliations in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Leslie Center for Humanities). Her other professional histories include curatorial and teaching work in art museums as well as public education for youth-based organizations within the communities she comes from: refugee, immigrant, and working-class.

 Najwa is co-chair of the SWANA Diasporas Studies Section of the Association for Asian American Studies and a host for the New Books Network podcast.