Since 2014, Muslim History Tour NYC works to preserve and retell narratives about who we are as a city, and as a nation by bringing attention to Muslims' contributions that have often gone unacknowledged, let alone recognized, by city plaques or dominant histories of the Big Apple. These stories certainly involve religious identity but are also accounts of race, immigration, and labor...of love, family, and loss...of rights denied and liberatory moments. They are ongoing.
Our collective, messy, mixed history as a city and country is incomplete when any one of us is missing. Let us search for and discover history together, so that we may build better, more accountable understandings of our past in a way that promotes a just and inclusive future!
Tour Founder and Guide
Dr. Katie Merriman is a scholar of race, class, and religion in the United States. Her research combines both historical and anthropological methods focused on Muslim communities and institutions, with previous work on charitable giving and solidarity economies and current projects on Muslim fugitive archives and memory projects in New York City. She also has a background in rights-based work in the United States and Jordan and lectures publicly on religious literacy and its relationship to building justice-based frameworks in community, education, and organizational settings. Merriman holds a PhD in Religious Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Master’s in Theological Studies from Harvard University. She is the former director of Islamic Studies at the University of Detroit Mercy in downtown Detroit.
Merriman is a passionate amateur historian of New York City as well. Her father, a native of Washington Heights and NYC-related bibliophile, taught her to value the city’s museums and public spaces and read its passing centuries through architecture. She can walk blindfolded and backwards through the Bronx Zoo and Metropolitan Museum of Art and believes the Louis Armstrong House in Corona is the most underrated museum in the city.