Zara Khan is a junior scholar in Political Science.  Her doctoral dissertation, “Refractions Through the Secular: Islam, Human Rights and Universality,” questions the universality claims of Human Rights on account of their secular definition of the human being, and unsettles the modern concept of ‘religion.’  She has taught comparative politics, social science literature and political theory at Lehigh University, the City University of New York and New Jersey City University.  She has published a report-back from a fact-finding mission to the West Bank in a women-of-color feminist magazine.  She is fluent in Urdu and Spanish.  Her next scholarly project will attempt, inshaAllah, to problematize the state-of-nature concept by drawing on foundational classical Islamic governance themes.