Pembroke Center

Rahma Haji’s scholarship is informed by black studies, gender and sexuality, and cultural studies. As an interdisciplinary and dreaming-towards-becoming-undisciplined scholar, her writing and teaching is informed by close reading and multimodal analysis. Her current project insists that the meme, as an aesthetic form and mode of communication, performs labor around race and racialization. She theorizes and charts the meme within a larger genealogy of black cultural production by focusing on the artistic productions of Arthur Jafa and Adrian Piper. In doing so, Haji maps out a prehistory of the meme by examining its relationship to performance, conceptual, video and internet art.

In the fall of 2025, Haji is teaching, “Is It Me or Is it Meme?: Blackness and Memes,” a course which explores black sensibilities of the meme. The course draws on various genealogical and methodological formations from queer of color critique, black studies and cultural studies to ground an expansive exploration of memes and visual culture broadly. The course investigates the aesthetic, affective, imaginative and cultural dimensions of memetic productions, paying particular attention to questions of identity, performance, relationality, circulation, and meaning-making. Finally, the course provides an opportunity to artistically and conceptually expand on the form of the meme in order to address broader discourses around culture, race, gender, sexuality, technology, and knowledge production.

Rahma Haji received both her PhD (2025), and M.A. (2020) from the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park and B.A. in Africana studies from Smith College. She received the American Association of University Women’s Dissertation Fellowship in 2024-2025.