Faculty Profiles

Ambitious Questions Deserve Multidisciplinary Answers

Legal studies majors ask big questions: what is law, and how did it get that way? Is justice the same everywhere? Is the world system broken, and what tools would we use to first understand and then try to fix it? “Legal studies,” Assistant Professor Iza Hussin explains, “is a good place to begin. The department is a founder and national leader of law and society studies at the undergraduate level. Plus,” Hussin notes, “we offer a place where legal practitioners, researchers doing cutting-edge work, and graduate students all collaborate and contribute to undergraduate development.”

Legal studies is a diverse, creative department where, Hussin says, “we find varied answers to questions about law, culture, politics and society. Our graduates go on to do meaningful work in law, journalism, activism, policy and education, among many other things.” In addition, says Hussin, the department is deeply engaged in the mission of public education at a time of great change, providing opportunities for internships with judges, community advocacy organizations and clinical practice.

Among Hussin’s classes are “Law, Society and Islam” and “Muslim Women and the Law.” She works with a wide range of students, she says, “from those who have never given the Muslim world a second thought and now see that they need to learn about it, to Iraq veterans who have deep knowledge of the interconnections between the US and Muslim states. During my first class here at UMass Amherst, one of these veterans said, ‘It’s hard to learn about Islam from the point of a gun.’ Students with real-world experience have made major contributions to my classes.”

Hussin, who came to UMass Amherst right after earning her PhD in political science from the University of Washington last year, has always been interested in how authority is constructed, maintained and changed, and especially what happens when God—or ideas of God—get involved. Her book on the politics of Islamic law, based on two years of field and archive research in Malaysia and the UK, is in the publication process at a major university press. “Next year,” she says, “I’ll be a fellow at Harvard Law School, to conduct further research on Islamic law and to build a foundation for the next research project, about how legal ideas, institutions and reforms travel.”

After September 11, 2001, Hussin, who had earned her MA in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard the previous year, received many requests for education on Islam and the Muslim world. “They came from Jewish, Christian and community groups all over the country,” she says. “Much of the next year I spent in town halls and churches and colleges talking to Americans not just about the theology and diversity of Islam but also of the deep connection between Muslim experience and colonial power, between world history in the last century and the politics of Islam in the current moment. Most of my teaching is aimed at helping people make these connections.”

Hussin’s research, which has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Council for Learned Societies, combines historical research with comparative political science, anthropology and Islamic legal studies. “My research,” she says, “is fully interdisciplinary and cross-regional at a time when the disciplines from which I draw my expertise are still quite bounded. I think of scholarship as an apprenticeship in a number of related crafts: research, writing, teaching and public scholarship. In these, I’ve had outstanding mentors.”

The Legal Studies Department has just been awarded a competitive Mellon Mutual Mentoring Grant for the coming year. “It helps that I’m driven by a real love of the questions of law and society research and that there’s a palpable excitement in the department about our research and teaching of these questions. This is why I came to UMass Amherst, in addition to the potential represented by the university-wide Law and Society Initiative and for Five College collaborations as well.”

Building on legal studies’ core strengths is exciting for Hussin. “We’re a top-ranked undergraduate program,” she explains. “We’re enhancing graduate programming and will bring fellows onto campus from all over the country, to enrich our intellectual collaborations, and we’re building a department where the crafts of multidisciplinary research, writing, teaching and public scholarship build on each other.”

May 20, 2009