Faculty biography - Farhat Haq
Farhat Haq was born in central Pakistan and moved to the United States when she was eighteen years old. She received her B.A. from SUNY Fredonia and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Cornell University. When she received a call for a tenure track position in Political Science from Monmouth College, she knew very little about small liberal arts colleges and the American Midwest. In her twenty-four years of teaching at Monmouth College she has become a true believer in the value of a liberal arts education. When she travels to different parts of the United States and the world she realizes that she has also become a ‘Midwesterner.’ She is currently the chair and a professor in the Political Science department and the coordinator for interdisciplinary major in International Studies at Monmouth College.
Becoming part of a small liberal arts college led to her engagement in interdisciplinary studies. She received four National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar awards to engage in advanced studies on topics of Comparative Religions at Harvard University; Nationalism and Ethnic Politics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison; Islamic Origins at the University of Chicago and an Asian Values Debate at Columbia University. She has also participated in almost a dozen Midwest faculty seminars at University of Chicago. From 1996 to 2000 she was the Midwest faculty fellow for the Regional World Initiative, a Ford Foundation project at the University of Chicago that considered new approaches to area studies. For one year the focus was on India and she was fortunate to be exposed to some of the top scholars engaged in study of India. These and many other ACM sponsored conferences and workshops expanded her intellectual horizons and informed her teaching and scholarship.
Another significant turn in her teaching and scholarship came with her 2003 year long sabbatical in Pakistan. She conducted research on women in Jihadi and Islamist organizations and taught in the Lahore University of Management Sciences, or LUMS. She has gone back since then during summers to teach summer courses at LUMS.
In 2004 she became the Illinois Humanities Council Road Scholar for five years in order to share her personal and scholarly experiences of the Islamic World with her fellow Americans. She felt that it was her civic duty to make a modest contribution towards challenging the pervasive notion of the ‘clash of civilizations’ and build a better understanding of the Muslim World in the U.S. She developed two programs entitled ‘Living Islam’ and ‘What’s The Deal With the Veil?’ She gave over fifty public presentations to a variety of groups ranging from high school students to local churches to employees of pharmaceutical companies.
From 2004 to 2007 she served as the faculty coordinator for ACM FaCE, the Mellon-Funded Faculty Career Enhancement Project. As a coordinator she interacted with fellow faculty members from a variety of institutional contexts and learned lessons about teaching, learning, scholarship and ‘campus politics.’ These opportunities kept her intellectually engaged in teaching, scholarship, and service at Monmouth College.
She was the recipient of Burlington-Northern Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Fulbright Teaching/Research Scholarship. She has published in the area of ethnic politics, gender and politics, Islam and Human Rights and militarism and motherhood. She is currently working on a manuscript titled “Secularizing Islam and Sacralizing the State: Maududi and the Jammat-i-Islami in South Asia.” She is eagerly anticipating her experience as the coordinator for the ACM India Studies Program.