Dr. Sara Katz

Sara Katz received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan in 2019. Her research concerns the Nigerian hajj—the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca—from the period of British colonial rule through the first two decades of independence. By examining government files alongside print culture and narratives of pilgrim experience, she shows how the hajj is defined by a constant crossing of scales (local, national, global) and in this way contests the pernicious colonial fiction of a divide between Nigeria’s “Muslim North” and “Christian South,” the fraught legacies of which she also traces.

More generally, her research and teaching interests include African history, global Islam, visual culture, and Muslim-Christian relations.