AY 24-25
Halimi, Sharifa
Sharifa Halimi currently serves as the Outreach Coordinator for the South Asia Center at the University of Pennsylvania, where she leads a range of outreach initiatives. Her responsibilities include overseeing the Speakers Bureau, developing partnerships with Community Colleges, Minority-Serving Institutions, and K-12 schools in the greater Philadelphia area, and managing the Center’s Summer Institute. She also coordinates South Asia-focused programming in collaboration with the Penn Museum and organizes all public-facing outreach events. Additionally, Sharifa runs the South Asia Center’s Summer Research Internships and the Pulitzer Fellowship for International Reporting.
Beyond her work at the South Asia Center, Sharifa is the founder of the Afghans of Philadelphia (AOP), one of the city’s first organizations dedicated to supporting the Afghan community. Through her outreach efforts, she works to engage the local community with South Asian-related topics, offering new perspectives and fostering cross-cultural understanding. Sharifa is committed to creating opportunities that help students and community members explore global perspectives by building meaningful connections.
Khan Vlach, Saba
Saba Khan Vlach is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at The University of Iowa. She is a Pakistani-American, Muslim woman. Saba taught elementary school for 17 years in Arlington, Texas. She earned her Master’s at Texas Woman’s University in Reading Education and her PhD in Curriculum and Instruction at The University of Texas at Austin. Saba’s research interests include teachers’ enactment of critical pedagogies, (diverse) children’s literature, literature discussions, young children’s reader responses, and inservice teacher education. Saba’s scholarship and practice draws on the conceptual frameworks of Freire’s theory of critical literacy, Kumashiro’s theory of anti-oppressive education, and Brown’s theory of humanizing critical sociocultural knowledge. Saba is thrilled to be on the SABA Committee!
Suseela, Eyal
Eyal Suseela is the Head of Public Services at the South Lansing branch of the Capital Area District Libraries. Prior to that, she was a public services librarian and a youth outreach librarian at CADL. She has a B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Michigan, and a double Master’s in Library Science and Information Science from Indiana University Bloomington.