Diana Coleman

Dr. Diana Murtaugh Coleman, a former Luce Fellow in Indonesia, is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at Northern Arizona University and a Faculty Associate at ASU who regularly teaches summer courses. A scholar of contemporary Islam with area expertise in Southeast Asia and North Africa,  training in post-Holocaust ethics, and six years’ experience with the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at ASU, her research reflects a multi-disciplinary expertise in religion and conflict.  Her training and research focused on contemporary Islam, Post Holocaust Ethics, U.S. militarism, and carceral issues is disseminated through numerous talks, presentations, and publications including work on the Guantánamo Public Memory Project,  the Free Shaker Aamer campaign, as an invited speaker at a Parliamentary Meeting on Shaker Aamer’s behalf at the Westminster House of Commons, the North Carolina Commission of Inquiry on Torture,  a chapter “The Amen Temple of Empire” in the New Caribbean Studies anthology Guantánamo and American Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); the article “El Sur También Existe: Imagining futures” in Cultural Dynamics, and articles in two special issues of Sargasso: A Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language and Culture, the 2017-18 Guantánamo: What’s Next? issue and the 2020-21 Camps, (In)Justice & Solidarity issue. She has conducted research, presented and participated in dozens of conferences, led panels and workshops, and guest lectured nationally and internationally throughout the United States, France, Morocco, Germany, South Africa, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, Argentina, Uruguay, Bangladesh, Austria, India (virtually), and the UK. She was a Humanities Scholar and presenter for the 2023 TOM KIEFER: El Sueño Americano / The American Dream exhibit at the Coconino Center for the Arts. She has recently completed training with the Inside Out Prison Exchange Program at Temple University. As NAU’s 2024/25 College of Arts and Letters teacher of the year and NAU’s Interns to Scholars program 2024/25 Mentor of the Year, and an invited keynote speaker for the June 2026 Camps Conference at University of Graz in Austria,  Dr. Coleman is deeply committed to empowering her students and to reaching broader publics beyond walls and borders.  

Her dissertation connects the fetishization of the trauma of nine/eleven with the co-constitution of subjects at Guantánamo—that of the contained Muslim terrorist prisoner silhouetted against the ideal nationalistic military body—circulated as ‘afterimages’ that carry ideological narratives about U.S. Empire. These narratives in turn religiously and racially charge the new normative practices of the security state and its historically haunted symbolic order. As individuals with complex subjectivities, the prisoners and guards are, of course, not reducible to the standardizing imprimatur of the state or its narratives. Despite the circulation of these ‘afterimages’ as fixed currency, the prisoners and guards produce their own metanarratives, through their para-ethnographic accounts of containment and of self. From within the panopticon of the prison, they seek sight lines, and gaze back at the state. The work is a meditation on US militarism, violence, torture, race, and carceral practices, revealed thematically through metaphors of hungry ghosts, nature, journey and death, liminality, time, space, community, and salvage. Based on a multi-sited, empirical and imaginary ethnography, as well as textual and discourse analysis, it draws on the writing and testimony of prisoners, and military and intelligence personnel, as insightful para-ethnographers of the haunting valence of this fetishized historical event. 

Advisor: Shahla Talebi 

Committee Members: Tracy Fessenden and Martin Beck Matuštík

Courses Taught:

Summer 2025

REL 321: Religion in America

Summer 2024

REL 321: Religion in America

Summer 2023

REL 202: Religion and Popular Culture

REL 321: Religion in America

Summer 2022

REL 202: Religion and Popular Culture

Summer 2021

REL 381: Religion and Moral Issues

Summer 2020

REL 381: Religion and Moral Issues *COVID19 Edition

REL 366/HST 339: Islam in the Modern World

Summer 2019 

REL 205: Life, Sex and Death

REL 321: Religion in America

REL 374: Witchcraft and Heresy in Europe

Summer 2018

REL 205: Life, Sex and Death

REL 381: Religion and Moral Issues

Spring 2018 

REL 202: Religion and Popular Culture

Fall 2017

REL 205: Life Sex and Death

Summer 2017

REL 205: Life, Sex, and Death

REL 390: Women, Gender, and Religion

Spring 2017

REL 366: Islam in the Modern World (Session A)

REL 366: Islam in the Modern World (Session B)

Fall 2016

REL 321: Religion in America

REL 366: Islam in the Modern World

Summer 2015

REL 381: Religion and Moral Issues (Session A)

REL 381: Religion and Moral Issues  (Session B) 

Spring 2015

REL 381: Religion and Moral Issues 

REL 366: Islam in the Modern World

Summer 2010

REL 205: Living and Dying 

REL 365: Islamic Civilization

Summer 2009

REL 365: Islamic Civilization

http://asu.academia.edu/DianaColeman

Speaking at Parliamentary Meeting, House of Commons

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5jG_IDEzU4