- Sandy Russell Jones
- Position:
Associate Teaching Professor of Islamic History and Religion
- Degree:
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
- at Rutgers:
since 2008
- Bio:
Sandy Russell Jones (she/her) is an Associate Teaching Professor in the History and Religion Departments. She has taught courses on Islamic Civilization, Women and Gender in the Islamic Middle East, the history of Islamophobia, and Comparative Religion since 2008. From 2010 – 2018, Russell Jones served as Director of the Middle Eastern Studies undergraduate program, and is currently the interim director (Fall 2026). She is also Co-Director of the Rutgers High School Teachers Institute (Fall 2025 - present). Through her participation in this year's seminar, Russell Jones is excited to enrich the development of her new course, From Sacred to Sinful: Gender, Religion, and Colonial Power, which examines ways in which colonial religious authority, based in the strict male/female gender binary, recoded the sexual and gender diversity they encountered in subject societies, much of which represented sacred dimensions of local cosmologies, as perverse, polluting, and shameful. She is also eager to produce public scholarship inspired by the intersection between the material she teaches and the seminar's themes.
