back to all faculty
Sarah Nahar
Lecturer III, Program in the Environment
Environmental Justice
Cross-cutting
Office
4040 Dana
Websites
About
Dr. Sarah Nahar (she) graduated with distinction in May 2025 from Syracuse University in Religion with a dissertation entitled, “Fertile, Social, Dangerous, Sacred, Gift, and System: Religion, Salt City Harvest Farm, and the Future of Human Shit.” She simultaneously matriculated at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry and wrote an additional dissertation entitled, “Dealing with our Crap, Literally and Metaphorically: Ecological Sanitation in Context of Environmental Studies and Religion.” She coined the terms Excreta Infrastructure Technology (ExIT) system, defecatory justice, and excretory justice.
As a lecturer, she teaches in the Program in the Environment, and focuses on ecological regeneration, community cultivation, environmental justice, and discard studies. Previously, Sarah was a 2019 Rotary Peace Fellow and worked at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center in Atlanta, Georgia. She has been the Executive Director of Community Peacemaker Teams, an organization committed to building partnerships to transform violence and oppression worldwide. Her scholar-activism has taken her to over 85 countries and sovereign nations on Turtle Island (North America).
Publications
Kawa, Nick, and Sarah Nahar. “Working toward Defecatory Justice.” Chapter 8 in After the Flush: Rethinking the Future of Human Waste, by Nick Kawa. University of California Press, 2026.
Nahar, Sarah. “Using the Doctrine of Discovery to increase shared language and conceptual frameworks for Black feminist and Indigenous feminist organizing." Journal for Culture and Religious Theory (Peer-reviewed journal). Vol 2, Issue 24, Article 6, Winter 2026.
Moran, Sharon, Jean Kayira, and Sarah Nahar. “Environmental studies curriculum innovations: New approaches to courses centering diversity and environmental knowledge.” Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. August 2025.
Nahar, Sarah. “Religious Moral Suasion and Material Support for the Environmental Justice Movement.” International Journal on Responsibility Vol. 9, Issue 1, Article 1, Feb 2025 (Full publication, 2026). 400 downloads as of 1 December 2025.
Nahar, Sarah. “Religion, Body, Excreta.” Yudit Kornberg Greenberg and George Pati, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Religion and the Body. Abingdon, and New York: Routledge, 2023, pp. 421–434.
Research
My research consists of expanding the field of discard studies with a focus on the discarded resource of human excreta. There are immense co-benefits available to humans and the larger web of life if we find out how to safely cycle the nutrients contained in humanure. I theorize at the intersections of environmental justice, religion (defined as: worldview, values, practices, restrictions, orientation), and sociotechnical studies. Each scale and watershed are different; so far we've found that separation at source and that processing and reintegration of nutrients as close to site of collection produces the most significant positive climate justice outcomes.
Accolades
Black Midwest Initiative Summer Institute in Environmental Justice fellow, 2025
International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, board student representative, 2024-2027
Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Department of Religion at Syracuse University, Academic Year 2024-25
Forum for Theological Educators BIPOC convening at American Academy of Religion, 2024
Keynote Speaker for the Rich Earth Institute Annual Summit in Brattleboro, Vermont, November 2024
SUNY-ESF General Program in Environmental Science Outstanding PhD Candidate award, 2024
Work That Reconnects Experienced Facilitator Gathering Keynote, June 2024
First Place Winner of the "Elevator Pitch Dissertation" competition at ESF, both 2023 and 2024
Mennonite Church USA’s inaugural Youth Climate Summit panelist and workshop leader, 2023
Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary Alumni Ministry and Service Award, 2022
Syracuse University African American Studies program fellow, AY 2019-2020 and AY 2020-2021
Spelman Student Government Assocation President, 2005-2006
Glamour Magazine Top Ten College Women to Watch, 2005
Finalist for both the Rhodes Scholarship and the Marshall Scholarship for the Atlanta District, 2005
Co-founder of the Atlanta University Center Peace Coalition, and its Convener AY 2003-2005
Education
PhD Syracuse University, Religion Department
PhD State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Environmental Studies Department
Masters of Divinity, Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Concentrations in Administration, and Liberation Theologies
Bachelors of Arts, Spelman College, Double Major in Comparative Women's Studies, and International Studies, Minor in Spanish
Affiliations
Black Midwest Initiative
International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture
The Work that Reconnects Network
Phi Beta Kappa Academic Honor Society