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Comments from March 2021 Symposium: When I look back on my college experience, Dr. Barlas holds a huge place in that experience. I have taken 4 courses with her and she advised me for my senior thesis. So, she knows a lot about me, both as a student and a person (and probably more than…

Dr. Barlas, I was a sophomore when I met you for the first time. At that point in my life, I was still struggling to find professors who could see me for all that I was and all that I could be. I was met with a multitude of unpleasant experiences from professors who had…

Dr. Barlas, It’s been over 20 years since I graduated from Ithaca. The fact that I still stop to send you a note every few years says a lot about the place you will always have in my heart. I wasn’t a politics major, and yet I found my way into your classroom. That forever…

Dear Professor Barlas, While it’s only been a year and a half since I took your Understanding Islam course in Sophomore year, the class, and your teaching, have had great impacts on me. You took a religion that I had no context outside of the news and 9/11 and managed to break it out of…

I encountered Professor Barlas while in the United States on a Spring exchange semester. I still cannot explain what drew me to take up her Understanding Islam class as a Journalism major – perhaps it was the culmination of years of intermittent religious and cultural curiosity, or a kind of fate, or perhaps even a…

Two weeks. That’s the amount of time I had to decide whether or not I’d drop your class. It was only the second class of the course and I felt sick to my stomach. I had only taken classes where we faced the professor, not each other. It was easier to look up instead of…

Asma has had a profound impact on me. She opened my eyes to the politics of the North and South. She was so kind and inspiring that her class, Third World Politics (1993-94), is still one of my favorite classes at Ithaca College. Much of my worldview and what I do now is shaped by…

I was a student of Dr. Barlas early in her career at Ithaca College, having graduated in 1992 with a degree in Politics. Whereas she was a native of Pakistan, Muslim, female, with an enormous intellect and a Ph.D., and allowed to stay in this country after being granted asylum, I grew up a product…

Thirty years ago  I was a freshman business major at Ithaca College. I had just returned from a summer living with Palestinian laborers on an Israeli settlement construction site. I was politically naive, optimistic and growing more confused by the day. I took a class with Dr. Barlas and I began thinking more deeply about…

In 1994, I started my first year at Ithaca College. Coming from Phoenix, Arizona, I already felt a bit out of place in Ithaca, but I had no idea what was in store when I walked in to my very first college course – Global Studies, taught by Dr. Asma Barlas. Right off the bat,…