Samah Choudhury is Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer with the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. She is at work on her first book, American Muslim and the Politics of Secularity, which asks how a “sense of humor” came to be a prized trait of the modern secular subject and why present-day Muslims are consistently configured as lacking this comportment. Through a study of the American Muslim standup comedians, she contends that Muslim legibility depends on situating Islam and within the logics of model secular subjecthood and the register of race. Her work has been supported by the Asian American Religions Research Initiative, the Center for Islam in the Contemporary World, the UNC Chapel Hill Asian American Center, the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, and the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice. She previously taught at Ithaca College and earned her PhD in Islamic Studies from UNC Chapel Hill in 2020.