UIC professor named 2024 Freedom Scholar
University of Illinois Chicago professor Nadine Naber has been selected to join the latest group of Freedom Scholars, a distinction from the Marguerite Casey Foundation that recognizes “exceptional scholar-activists committed to advancing justice and equity.”
Naber and three other members of the 2024 cohort will each receive a $250,000 grant to advance their work on social justice issues.
For two decades, Naber, an author, public speaker and activist, has researched and done community work involving racial justice, gender justice, women of color feminisms, Arab and Muslim feminisms, Arab Americans and Muslim Americans. At UIC, she is a professor of gender and women’s studies, Global Asian studies and anthropology.
Through the Chicago-based organization MAMAS and the United Nations Special Rapporteurs on Racial Discrimination and Torture, she currently helps lead research on activism by people who are mothering in the face of police violence, militarism and migration restrictions.
“This work supports impacted mothers of color participating in feminist, decolonial and abolitionist policy processes and freedom movements and will culminate in a book,” Naber said.
In addition to the book project “Pedagogies of the Radical Mother,” she is co-authoring a book on social movement-based research methods. Naber also continues to publish her scholarship on Palestinian and other Arab feminist and queer movements.
“I view my selection for this award as a recognition of knowledge production rooted in long-standing relationships with community-based researchers, movement lawyers and social movements,” she said. “I also see it as an affirmation of scholars who have refused to remain silent about the atrocious acts of state violence ongoing in places like Palestine and the Sudan – and right here in our own backyard in Chicago.”
Naber is the third UIC scholar named a Freedom Scholar since the award was established in 2020. The other UIC-affiliated recipients have been professors Barbara Ransby in 2020 and Beth Richie in 2022.
She is the author of “Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism” and co-editor of four books.
Naber’s previous honors include the American Studies Association’s Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Lifetime Achievement Prize, the YWCA’s Y-Women’s Leadership Award and an international fellowship from the Open Society Foundation. She has received grants from the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities Without Walls consortium and the MacArthur Foundation. Her UIC-based accolades include the Silver Circle Teaching Award, Community Engagement Award and University Scholar Award.
Naber has taught at UIC since 2013 and was the founding director of the Arab American Culture Center, established by the university in 2016. Before UIC, she was at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she co-founded the Arab and Muslim American studies program.