As a sociologist of international migration and race/ethnicity at University of Pennsylvania, I study how migration and global inequalities affect immigrants, particularly those from Muslim-majority countries in the West. My book, Here, There, and Elsewhere: The Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World, has won the American Sociological Association's Thomas and Znaniecki Book Award from the International Migration Section, the Distinguished Book Award from the Sociology of Religion Section, and the Asian America Book Award from the Asia and Asian America Section. It has also won the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the Pacific Sociological Association. Other recognitions include the Early Career Investigator Award from the Canadian Sociological Association. My work has been taught in over two dozen courses and I have given invited talks in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. My new project on interfaith and interracial relationships of South Asian Muslim immigrants shows how geopolitics penetrates even the most intimate aspects of people's lives: how they think of themselves, who they date and who they marry, and how they aspire their children's futures to be. I earned my PhD from UCLA in 2018.
Ph.D. Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, 2018
M.A. Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, 2014
B.S. Sociology, University of Southern Mississippi, 2012
International Migration, Globalization, Race/Ethnicity, Religion, Muslims, South Asians, Immigrant Identities
Book:
Shams, Tahseen. 2020. Here, There, and Elsewhere: The Making of Immigrant Identities in a Globalized World. Stanford University Press.
Articles:
Elcioglu, Emine Fidan and Tahseen Shams (equal co-authors). 2023. “Brokering Immigrant
Transnationalism: Remittance, Family Reunification, and Private Refugee Sponsorship in
Neoliberal Canada.” Current Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1177/00113921231155652.
Waldinger, Roger and Tahseen Shams. 2023. “Cross-Border Politics: Diasporic Mobilization and State Response.” Annual Review of Sociology 49(1).
Shams, Tahseen. 2022. “Race, Religion, and Geopolitics: Dating and Romance among South Asian Muslim Immigrants in Canada.” Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review 83(4): 505-526.
Shams, Tahseen. 2021. “Homeland and Heartland: Reconceptualizing the ‘Muslim’ ‘Diaspora’.” Diaspora 21(1): 47-63.
Shams, Tahseen. 2019. “Successful yet Precarious: South Asian Muslim Americans, Islamophobia, and the Model Minority Myth.” Sociological Perspectives 63(4): 653-669.
Shams, Tahseen. 2018. “Visibility as Resistance by Muslim Americans in a Surveillance and Security Atmosphere.” Sociological Forum 33(1): 73-94.
Shams, Tahseen. 2017. “Mirrored Boundaries: How Ongoing Homeland-Hostland Contexts Shape Bangladeshi Immigrant Collective Identity Formation.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40(4): 713-731.
Shams, Tahseen. 2015. “Bangladeshi Muslims in Mississippi: Impression Management Based on the Intersectionality of Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender.” Cultural Dynamics 27(3): 379-397.
Shams, Tahseen. 2015. “The Declining Significance of Race or the Persistent Racialization of Blacks?: A Conceptual, Empirical, and Methodological Review of Today’s Race Debate in America.” Journal of Black Studies 46(3): 282-296.
Reid, Julie and Tahseen Shams. 2013. “Gender and Multigenerational Global Human Development.” Sociology Compass 7/8: 612-629.