Diana Coleman
Dr. Diana Murtaugh Coleman graduated from Arizona State University with a PhD in Religious Studies in May 2018. She previously earned a B.A. in English Literature summa cum laude, a history minor, and certificates in Islamic and Arabic Studies. As a Luce Fellow, Diana first traveled to Indonesia in 2009 where she conducted research on contemporary anti-Jewish conspiracy tracts, and has returned to Southeast Asia for three two-month stints of fieldwork in her role as a graduate research assistant for the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict.
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 Matustik
Courses Taught:
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
