Biography
Scholar, activist, convert
Karla N. Kovacik with Dr. Lewis Rambo · American Academy of Religion Nationals · Atlanta, GA · 2015
Karla N. Kovacik (formerly Evans) is the founder of The Feeling Muslim Project and the author of Feeling Muslim: Prolegomena to the Study of American Female Converts to Islam (MA thesis, University of Georgia, 2015). Her research was directed by Dr. Alan A. Godlas, with committee members Dr. Carolyn Medine, Dr. Kenneth Honerkamp, and Dr. Sandy Dwayne Martin.
Karla earned her B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2005, where she studied Anthropology under faculty who taught her the foundations of anthropological theory, Islam in the Middle East and Central Asia, and the Anthropology of Islam. She then pursued graduate study in the Department of Religion at the University of Georgia, where her work was recognized with a Willson Center Graduate Research Award and a UGA Alumni Association Diversity Research Scholarship.
As a single mother in graduate school, Karla also received the need-based SHARE Atlanta scholarship, a context she names openly in her thesis, because the acknowledgment of the researcher's personal circumstances is itself part of her scholarly commitment to honoring emotion and lived experience in academic work.
As an American female convert to Islam herself, Karla brought both scholarly rigor and lived experience to her research, and to her knowledge, this is the first study to directly ask American female converts about their feelings of Muslimness, or what feeling Muslim means to them.