Office Hours: Colleen Nugent McLean

Join Colleen Nugent McLean, CDS Coordinator, for a discussion of her dissertation research. Her dissertation interrogates the colonial roots of modern British anti-Muslim racism, specifically the idea that Islam is inherently ‘fanatical,’ ‘violent,’ and ‘incompatible’ with the West. She uses digital text analysis, specifically word embedding models, to chart the construction of British anti-Muslim discourse across three case studies from the colonial period: the 1857 Rebellion in India, the battle of Omdurman and the Candia Massacre in late 1898, and the German-Ottoman declaration of jihad during the First World War. The Rushdie Affair in 1989 is often pointed to as the “start” of this discourse, and I argue that the rhetoric found in these colonial instances mirrors the modern language used during the Rushdie Affair. She uses word vector analysis on corpora of The Times of London to chart the consistent British association between fanaticism and Muslims.