Research Interests
African American legal history; First Amendment; Fourteenth Amendment; critical legal theory; law and literature; American literature
Biography
Dr. Khan’s research focuses broadly on African American legal history, including how the field intersects with constitutional jurisprudence, social movement lawyering, and literary culture. This interdisciplinary scholarship draws on Dr. Khan’s graduate training in law and literature; she holds a J.D. with honors from the University of Chicago Law School and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia. She also has an interest in gender equality and recently served as a research fellow affiliated with the University’s Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies. Dr. Khan’s work often centralizes figures whose identity or disciplinary hybridity has resulted in their marginalization from conventional accounts of U.S. legal history and jurisprudence.
Dr. Khan’s current book project, An Intellectual Reconstruction: American Legal Realism, Literary Realism, and the Formation of Citizenship, construes legal realism (a progenitor of critical race theory) and literary realism as major post-Civil War movements that participated in the process of equitist national rebuilding through the seemingly insular process of disciplinary reformation. Chapters in the project discuss developments in constitutional law, criminal law, and contract law through the conceptual framework of citizenship studies. Dr. Khan has won several grants to support project research, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Dr. Khan’s legal and literary scholarship has been published in several journals and edited collections, including the Washington University Jurisprudence Review; the Chicago Journal of International Law; American Literary History; American Literary Realism; Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History; the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry; and The Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Literature. Recent articles include “Reconstituting the Canon: The Rise of the Black Lives Matter Judicial Opinion” and “Civil Rights Lawyering and the Reconstruction of Law and Literature.”
Dr. Khan has also published widely on pedagogy through the lens of critical theory, drawing on extensive experiences teaching law, literature, and composition. Her pedagogical scholarship has appeared in the Washburn Law Journal; Perspectives: Teaching Legal Research & Writing; The Law Teacher; and the edited collection Writing as a Way of Staying Human in a Time that Isn’t. In addition, Dr. Khan has advised students who have published articles on subjects spanning from queer rights to international economic law. Dr. Khan’s pedagogy aims to empower students as nascent scholars and lawyers, seeing the classroom as a space where, in lawyer Paulo Freire’s terms, a “teacher-student” interacts with “student-teachers” on a joint journey of discovery.
Complementing Dr. Khan’s scholarship in inclusive intellectual history and pedagogy, her service work includes being an executive committee member of the Association of American Law Schools’ Section on Critical Theories. She was also elected to the Society of American Law Teachers’ Board of Governors. Finally, she is working with the Antiracist Development Institute on the Building an Antiracist Law School, Legal Academy, and Legal Profession book series.
Education
B.A. English, Stanford University (2003)
M.A. English, University of California-Irvine (2010)
J.D. , University of Chicago (2006)
Ph.D. English, University of Virginia (2017)