About

Justine Howe is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and the Faculty Director of the Flora Stone Mather Center for Women. Professor Howe specializes in contemporary Islam with an ethnographic focus on Muslim communities in the United States. Professor Howe joined the Department of Religious Studies in Fall 2013 and is a core faculty member in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at CWRU. She holds a PhD in Religious Studies from Northwestern University and an MA in Anthropology and Sociology of Religion from the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Her first book, Suburban Islam (Oxford University Press 2018), explores why local, diffuse communities, or generative “third spaces,” are crucial for tracking the possibilities and constraints of contemporary Muslim American identity. Focusing on suburban Chicago, the book demonstrates how third space communities have transformed leisure practices, such as football games and nature walks, into practices that its members understand as enactments of Islamic piety. Even as third spaces attempt to transcend various divisions in the American ummah, they also augment tensions within enduring Muslim debates around authority and ethics.

Professor Howe’s second book, Maryam Jameelah and the Global Muslim Imagination, is forthcoming with Princeton University Press in October 2026. The book explores the convergence of postwar American religious politics and transnational Islamic revival through the life and work of Maryam Jameelah, an American Jewish convert to Islam. The book shows how Jameelah harnessed negative emotions to call attention to what she saw as the catastrophes wrought by modernity. For Jameelah, galvanizing these emotions formed the basis of global Muslim solidarity that could be mobilized for a reinvigorated Islamic future. The multivalent threads that animated Jameelah’s religious imagination reveals unexpected entanglements of American Judaism, global Islam, feminism, and anticolonialism.

She is also the editor of the Routledge Handbook of Islam and Gender (2020). The volume features 32 original essays related to various dimensions of gender and sexuality in global Muslim contexts.

Professor Howe has published several articles and book chapters related to her research in venues such as Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, Journal of Quranic Studies, Journal of Muslim Philanthropy and Civil Society and the Routledge Handbook of Early Islam.

Professor Howe’s work has received numerous grants and fellowships, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Academy of Religion, and the American Association of University Women, and the Expanding Horizons Initiative at CWRU. She is a National Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at IUPUI.

She teaches a wide range of courses, including Introducing Islam, Anthropology of Religion, Islam, Gender and Women, and religion and technology.