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 and Islam in Southeast Asia and the body in Malay society. She was previously a research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies at Leiden University. Before that, she 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, Religion and Gender and many other peer-reviewed journals. Alicia has been on the organising committee of the Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas Conference (ASEACC) since 2018. After years in preparation, she is completing her second monograph on Malay print romance, and co-editing with Patrick F. Campos a book on Southeast Asian cinemas.

Outside of academia, 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. Before that, she has written for numerous, some now-defunct, publications, including The State (magazine), The F-Word Blog, Merdeka Review, and Muslimah Media Watch. 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. When she is not reading, writing, or teaching, she is playing the piano, cooking, and, since 2023, has been running the Walter Benjamin Reading Group at the Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film. There is also a blog [links to posts below] with hundreds of posts that she has kept since 2008.

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