Jazmin Eyssallenne
Jazmin Graves Eyssallenne is Assistant Professor in the African American and African Diaspora Studies Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Jazmin received her Ph.D. from the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago in 2021. Her doctoral research focused on African-descended women’s private ritual practices of ecstatic devotion in the Sidi (African-Indian) Sufi tradition of western India. She examined African-Indian Muslim women’s devotion to the patron saints of their community, particularly female saints, and how such devotion engenders healing and aligns with the life cycle events of marriage and motherhood. After experiencing these life cycle events herself, Jazmin has expanded her religious ethnographic research to include childbirth as a context for ecstatic experiences, embodied knowledge, healing, and ritual authority among birthers and midwives in community (out-of-hospital) birthing spaces.
Jazmin’s doctoral research has been supported by a Thurgood Marshall Fellowship at Dartmouth College and the American Institute of Indian Studies’ Junior Research Fellowship. Jazmin has also been awarded the Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty from the Institute for Citizens & Scholars in Princeton, New Jersey and the Fellowship for Faculty at North Carolina Minority-Serving Institutions from The Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Most recently, Jazmin received a College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Award from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for her research on Ayurveda, a traditional medicine system of India, and Black maternal health. Jazmin co-edited the three-volume publication, Afro-South Asia in the Global African Diaspora (2020), with Omar H. Ali, Kenneth X. Robbins, and Beheroze Shroff. She was named one of the MIPAD Global Top 100 Most Influential People of African Descent Under 40 in 2018 for her participatory action research with Sidis in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. In 2017, Jazmin organized the “Scholars at the Intersection of South Asian and Africana Studies” conference at Howard University, bringing together an international community of educators to present their research and introduce opportunities for student involvement. Jazmin serves on the boards of the Ethiopian, East African, and Indian Ocean Research Network and the Islamic Studies Research Network at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
