Faculty Profile

Ph.D.,Georgia State University
M.A., Georgia State University
B.A., Agnes Scott College

Moon Charania is an Associate Professor in International Studies at Spelman College and Affiliate faculty in Comparative Women’s Studies. Charania is a feminist theorist who researches and publishes in the area of transnational feminism, queer of color critique, and psychoanalysis. She is the author of two books, Will the Real Pakistani Woman Please Stand Up: Empire, Visual Culture, and the Brown Female Body (McFarland 2015) and most recently, Archive of Tongues: An Intimate History of Brownness (Duke University Press, 2023). In her latest book, Archive of Tongues, Charania investigates brownness through the provocation of the maternal, the effacing of the brown maternal and the abject maternal body are the driving vexations of this book.

Charania is also the recipient of a number of awards and fellowships, including the Spelman College Presidential Award for Excellence in Scholarship (2018), a Rockefeller Grant to study psychoanalysis in the Global South (2023), a Fellow at Emory University James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference (2018) and a Fellow at the National Humanities Center (2024). Charania has recently been appointed as a Fulbright Specialist to develop Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies programs across the Global South. She is beginning a new book project on brownness and femicide.

• Girls
• Capitalism: A Ghost Story
• Race, Sex and Empire
• Regarding the Pain of Others
• Black Queer Studies
• Feminism, Sexuality, and Islam
• Senior Seminar

New Book: Archive of Tongues: An Intimate History of Brownness (Duke U. Press) 

Popular Publications, Review Essays, and Media Appearances:

2021 - “Brown Girls, White Feminism, and the Necropolitics of War.” Global Media Cultures Podcast. September.

2021 - “Jose Munoz, The Sense of Brown: A Review.” Society and Space, June 28.

2020 - “Is Massachusetts Shaming Divorced Parents?” Boston Magazine. November 25.

2018 - “Pride in Pakistan: An Interview with Moon Charania.” In Investigating Social Problems, 2^nd edition, Ed. Treviño, A Javier. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. January.

2017 - “Campaign calls on colleges to end rape culture.” NBC News. November 15.