Jasmine Syedullah is a theorist of abolitionist movement scholarship as well as co-author of Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation (North Atlantic Books, 2016). She joined the faculty of Vassar College in 2019 and holds Africana Studies’ first Assistant Professor line there, currently developing interdisciplinary Prison Studies curricula and programming that integrates cultural studies, political theory, abolitionist geography, black feminism, critical ethnic studies, and contemplative studies. Her current book project “Negress Ex Machina” centers Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 abolitionist narrative as a protofeminist foundation for seeing how prophets from the margins shape abolitionist movement theory and practice.
Before returning to the east coast, Syedullah taught at the University of San Francisco and the University of California Santa Cruz where she completed her PhD in Politics with designated emphasis in Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness. Her research is published in Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International; Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics; The Journal of Contemporary Political Theory; Society and Space; Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, and Truthout.
Out in the world, Dr Sy, as she is affectionately called, is a certified yoga teacher, a mindfulness instructor, and skilled facilitator, bringing embodied contemplative approaches critical reckonings our habituated relationships to white supremacy and carceral culture, transforming colonizing logics that shape the places we call home from the inside out.
