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