Biography

Patricia Sloane-White is a social anthropologist who earned her DPhil at University of Oxford. Chair of Women and Gender Studies, she is also an associate professor of anthropology and a member of the Asian Studies and Islamic Studies Programs.  She has researched Islam, capitalism, entrepreneurship, corporate business, and gender in Malaysia for over two decades and was a recipient of a Fulbright Research Fellowship to Malaysia in 2008-2009 and a Fulbright Specialist Scholar to Malaysia in 2014. 

Degrees

DPhil, University of Oxford

Books and Book Chapters

• Corporate Islam: Sharia and the Modern Workplace (Cambridge University Press, 2018) concerns the relationship between business and work culture and sharia (Islamic law). Dr. Sloane-White studies how sharia has increasingly emerged as a novel form of corporate culture, reconfiguring workplace identities and relations in distinctly Islamic ways. To the people in the Islamic economy she studied, sharia is not merely a guide for financial operations. It is, as Muslim jurists understand it and in the fullest meaning of the word, a “path,” a way of life (and a way of work). She writes about the use and growth of Islamic principles and precepts in the capitalist workplace, Islamic philanthropy and corporate zakat, and how Islamic ideals are used to define the nature of modern capitalist power relations and class, ethnic, and gender relations, as well as relations between individuals and institutions.
• Islam, Modernity and Entrepreneurship among the Malays (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave/Macmillan Press and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), a detailed study of urban Malay Muslim society in the process of capitalist transformation.

Journal Articles

• "Collecting, Resisting, and Paying Zakat in Corportatizing Malaysia." In Lemiere, Sophie (ed), Illusions of Democracy, University of Amsterdam, 2019.
• "Company Rules: Sharia and its Transgressions in the Malay-Muslim Corporate Workplace," Journal of Southeast Asian Affairs, 37:1, April 2018.
• “Interrogating ‘Malayness’: Islamic Transformations among Malay College Kuala Kangsar (MCKK) Old Boys,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, June 2014.
• “Beyond Islamism at Work: ‘Corporate Islam’ in Malaysia,” in Roy, Olivier and Amel Boubekeur (eds), Whatever Happened to the Islamists? New York: Columbia University Press/Hurst, 2013.
• “Working in the Islamic Economy,” Sojourn, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 26: 2, 2011. 
• “From Sisters to Sinners in One Generation: The Shifting Status of Middle-Class Malay Girlhood.” In Helgren, Jennifer and Colleen A. Vasconcellos (eds), Girlhood: A Global History. Rutgers University Press, 2010.
• “Beyond Fifty Years of Political Stability in Malaysia: Rent and the Weapons of the Power Elite,” Patricia Sloane-White and Isabelle Beaulieu. Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 30: 1, 2010.
• “US and Malaysian Students: Encounters in Modernity.” In Lee, Julian (ed), The Malaysian Way of Life. Tarrytown, NY and London: MarshallCavendish, 2010.
• “The Hospitable Middle-Class Muslim Home in Urban Malaysia: A Sociable Site for Economic and Political Action,” in Lynch, Paul; Alison J. McIntosh; and Hazel Tucker (eds), Commercial Homes in Tourism: An International Perspective. London: Routledge, 2009.

Current and Past Courses

• Anthropology of Capitalism
• The Anthropology of Global Youth
• Asian Women in the Global Workplace
• Wives, Mistresses, and Mothers: Asian Women’s Lives
• Sex, Power, and Money in Asia
• History of Anthropological Theory
• Immigrant Islam in the West (Study Abroad Paris and London)
• Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology
• Muslim Delaware
• Peoples and Cultures of East Asia
• Peoples and Cultures of Southeast Asia
• Anthropology of Islam
• Tutorial in Social and Cultural Anthropology: Reading and Writing Ethnography
• Wives, Mistresses, and Matriarchs: Asian Women’s Lives
• Young, Privileged and Global: American and Malaysian Lives (interactive videoconference course co-taught with university students in Malaysia)