Rajaa Moini
Education:
- MA in Comparative Literature Purdue University, School of Languages and Cultures, May 2024
- BA in Communication Studies and Design, Habib University, School of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences
Courses
- COM319: Accessing the Liminal: Dreams, Madness, Memory and Beyond
- COM/DES317: Unfashioned Creatures: Reading and Making Monsters
- CORE102: What is Modernity?
- COM204: Elements of Aesthetics
- CND102: Ideation and Processes
- CORE101: Rhetoric and Communication
Research Interests
- Wonder, imagination and the invisible
- Madness
- Religious experience
- Monstrosity and the supernatural
- Liminality
- Culture and mind
- Thanatology
Biography
Rajaa Moini is a transdisciplinary scholar and predoctoral fellow specializing in liminal studies and the anthropology of belief. Her work lies at the intersection of literature, anthropology, art and religious studies. She holds a BA in Communication and Design from Habib University and an MA in Comparative Literature from Purdue University, where she was a Fulbright scholar. Her MA thesis, titled “Ghosts at the Threshold: Disembodied memory and mourning in war-related violent death in contemporary Middle Eastern and South Asian literatures”, explored the impact of incomplete mourning on the process of death. Her current fellowship research, titled “Meanings of Madness: Investigating the experience of disorder in the sociocultural landscape of Pakistan”, aims to understand how madness is experienced within communities in Pakistan, specifically at the intersection of Western psychiatry and native (often religious) healing practices, through ethnographic fieldwork. It seeks to understand the various ways in which “disorder” is integrated within the community and, if integration is not viable, how it is expelled.
Publications
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