Name: Sarah Abolail

Recipient Type: Scholarship Recipient

Recipient Year: 2021

School Name: UC Irvine

Major: English

Description: Sarah Abolail is an English Ph.D. student and Nevin Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. Her current project reframes the history of race, representation, and Islam within the U.S. Sarah’s research also explores the intersections of new media forms and political economy. In her final year at UCLA, Sarah was awarded Highest Honors for her thesis, “Out of Time Men, Capitalism, Violence, and Breaking Bad,” where she connects the 2008 recession with the overflow of violent anti-hero narratives. Sarah was also selected to teach her own new media course on the “Rise of the Anti-hero,” a UCLA seminar on the political and economic contexts of pop-cultural representations. Sarah is passionate about re-imagining institutional spaces and our ability to revolutionize them. She co-founded the Critical Race Collective Initiative, a collaborative space focused on identifying, discussing, and responding to problems of representation within the academy.

Sponsor: Muslim Community Association of the Bay Area (MCA) Scholarship