Alicia Izharuddin is a sociologist of religion and gender, and Senior Visiting Fellow in Gender and Sexuality in the Malay Studies Department at the National University of Singapore from January 2023 where she teaches courses on gender in Southeast Asia and Malay-Indonesian cinema. She was previously a research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies at Leiden University where she finished writing her second book on affective Muslim publics. She has held research and teaching positions at the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School and the Gender Studies Programme at University of Malaya. She earned her PhD and MA (with Distinction) in Gender Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and has since published in several leading journals including Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Gender, Place, and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, Feminist Media Studies, and many other peer-reviewed journals. Alicia has been on the organising committee of the Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas Conference (ASEACC) since 2018.

A keen contributor to literary and film magazines, she has written essays for the Mekong Review, The New Inquiry, and Another Gaze: A Feminist Film Journal. She also wrote a column on gender and sexual politics, and higher education for the Malay Mail newspaper until 2018. Her first book is Gender and Islam in Indonesian Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan 2017). Alicia has lived in Jakarta, San Diego, Kuala Lumpur, Cambridge (MA), London, Oxford, Leiden, and currently resides in Singapore. A classically-trained pianist since she was six years old, she enjoys playing JS Bach’s preludes and fugues from the Well-Tempered Klavier Books 1 and 2 (the G-minor fugue from Book 2 is a personal favourite), Schubert’s impromptus, and Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words. She has recently co-founded the Sastrawati Translation Project to showcase the writings of Malay women writers in translation.

List of scholarly publications

Invited lectures, conferences, workshops, podcasts

Courses taught/currently teaching

For media/manuscript review requests/speaking invitations and other enquiries, she can be emailed at alicia [dot] izharuddin [at] gmail [dot] com