Kirsten M. Wesselhoeft

Kirsten Wesselhoeft is Associate Professor and Chair of Religion at Vassar. She directs Vassar's correlate program in Migration and Displacement Studies, and serves on the steering committees of International Studies and Women, Feminist, and Queer Studies.

Drawing on long-term ethnography as well as legal, political, and media analysis, Wesselhoeft's research seeks to understand how modern and contemporary Muslims build community and pursue social change in contexts shaped by colonialism and liberal secularism. She has been conducting ethnographic and archival research in France for over 20 years, and has also conducted research in Jordan, Turkey, and the United States. Her research interests include social ethics, gender and religion, migration, religion and race, Islam and the body, and foodways and ritual. She is currently at work on a modern cultural history of Ramadan in secular time, under contract with Princeton University Press.

Wesselhoeft’s first book, Fraternal Critique: The Politics of Muslim Community in France  (University of Chicago Press, January 2025), is a study of Muslim intellectual and activist culture in 21st century greater Paris. It takes up both the agonistic ethics of community developed by socially engaged French Muslims, and the ethics of society expressed through recent French laws and policies, all in the context of widespread Islamophobia and an ascendant anti-immigrant right. Based in ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2008 and 2019, Fraternal Critique demonstrates how young Muslim activists use disagreement and dissent to cultivate community, a value that is in turn stigmatized by political elites as "communalist" and "separatist." In the course of their arguments about the aspirations, values, and histories that should anchor Muslim life, French Muslims have developed an ethical framework and method that some of them call “fraternal critique.” This double entendre re-appropriates both the classical Islamic discourse of the “ethics of disagreement” and the canonical Republican virtue of fraternité . Rather than fragmenting moral communities, "fraternal critique" orients argument and debate as practices of solidarity and belonging. This intervention has important consequences, not only for the study of Islam and society, but also for wider conversations about the place of critique and discord in the civic life of liberal democracies.

At Vassar, Wesselhoeft teaches courses on global Islam, race, and colonialism, on gender, religion, and the body, on qualitative research methods, and on migration and displacement. She also teaches an introductory survey course in Religion entitled "Religion, Violence, and Peacebuilding," and an inter-departmental introduction to Contemporary Arab Cultures, which orients students to the religion, culture, arts and politics of the Arabic-speaking world.

From 2022-2024, she was the Faculty Director and PI of the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education (CFMDE), a cross-institutional grant from the Mellon Foundation, hosted at Vassar. The CFMDE addressed the global challenge of forced migration by leveraging the unique potential of liberal arts institutions to support displaced scholars, engage in transdisciplinary study of migration, and welcome newcomers to our region.