On January 28th Professor Sahar Amer of the University of Sydney visited UConn to deliver a talk titled “Muslim Women, Veiling, and Human Rights.” Professor Amer, whose work tackles diverse topics such as cross-cultural relations and postcolonial identities, spoke on themes related to her well-received book, What is Veiling? (UNC Press, 2014). The talk took aim at recent trends toward Islamophobia in the West, which primarily victimizes veiled Muslim women as the most visible contingent of their community. Specifically, Amer sought to problematize the concept of veiling itself in order to combat facile associations of the practice with the oppression of women in Muslim culture. Examples such as the explosion of Islamic haute couture were used to demonstrate a very different vision of the veil’s contemporary cultural value, while commentary on Islamic (moral) beauty pageants, integrated and all-women mosques, and both female and homosexual imams served to illuminate other progressive currents in modern Islam. Amer’s inclusion of these elements offered a nuanced vision of Muslim women’s rights that is often lacking in Western discourse, emphasizing that a woman’s right to choice in wearing the veil ought to be respected, even in cultural contexts in which the practice has become highly stigmatized. Professor Amer closed her presentation with this firm assertion: “Human rights must become compatible with cultural pluralism.”