Dr. Maha Hilal

Dr. Maha Hilal is the co-Director of Justice for Muslims Collective where she focuses on political education addressing institutionalized Islamophobia. Previously, she was the inaugural Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. where she produced research and writing on the consequences of the War on Terror on the Muslim community. Dr. Hilal is also an organizer with Witness Against Torture and a Council member of the School of the Americas Watch. She earned her doctorate in May 2014 from the Department of Justice, Law and Society at American University in Washington, D.C. The title of her dissertation is "Too damn Muslim to be trusted": The War on Terror and the Muslim American response. She received her Master's Degree in Counseling and her Bachelor's Degree in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has worked at a number of human rights/social justice organizations including the Center for Victims of Torture, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, and the Government Accountability Project. Dr. Hilal was previously a Christine Mirzayan Fellow at the National Academy of Sciences as well as a recipient of the Department of State's Critical Language Scholarship for Arabic study in Morocco.