As an intellectual historian, Dr. Khan analyzes the dynamic relationships between legal and literary movements for equal citizenship in the postbellum United States. Drawing on her Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia and her J.D. with honors from the University of Chicago Law School, she interrogates how creative forms of legal dissent ‒ ranging from judicial opinions to lyric poems and graphic narratives ‒ have sparked constitutional reimagination in the context of African American, working-class, and women’s experiences. Dr. Khan’s scholarship often centralizes figures whose identity or disciplinary hybridity has resulted in their marginalization from conventional accounts of U.S. legal history and jurisprudence.
Her 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 received 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 anthologies and journals, including Critical Insights: Social Justice and American Literature; Critical Insights: Inequality; American Literary Realism; parallax; Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History; the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry; and the Chicago Journal of International Law. Recent articles include “Black Lives Matter and Legal Reconstructions of Elegiac Forms” and “Albion Tourgée’s New Realism: Disciplinary Dissent and the Quest for Racial Justice.”
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 anthology 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 Minority Groups. She was also appointed to AALS’s Recruitment and Retention of Minority Law Teachers and Students Committee and is on the interim advisory board for the Richard Wright Society. Finally, she is collaborating with the Antiracist Development Institute on the Building an Antiracist Law School, Legal Academy, and Legal Profession book series.
