SHOBANA SHANKAR
Professor (Ph.D., UCLA, 2003)
Curriculum vitae
Office: SBS S-319
Email:
shobana.shankar@stonybrook.edu
Interests: Africa (particularly West Africa), colonial and postcolonial politics,
religion, health, Muslim-Christian interactions, Africa-South Asia connections
My work brings together history, anthropology, religion, and public health. Across
these fields, I examine belonging, difference, and exclusion, focusing on modern Africa,
the African diaspora, and African-Indian encounters. My first book,
Who Shall Enter Paradise? Christian Origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, c. 1890-1975 (Ohio University Press, 2014) traces the emergence and disappearance of a religious
minority in Muslim Northern Nigeria. I have also co-edited two collections of research
essays,
Religions on the Move (Brill, 2013), and
Transforming Religious Landscapes in Africa: The Sudan Interior Mission (SIM), Past
and Present)
(Africa World Press, 2018). I am currently working on two books. The first, tentatively
titled “India in the Black Atlantic: Racial Reckoning in Postcolonial Africa,” focuses
on race in African-Indian relations as a multilayered discourse defined by religion,
slavery, caste, and physical appearance, as well as Euro-American hierarchies, against
a history of anti-Indian violence in Africa and more recent attacks on Africans migrants
in India and protests against commemoration of Gandhi from Ghana to Malawi. The second
situates African experiences of health and disease in world history to reveal that
modern medicine can no longer be understood as a series of triumphal successes but
rather as a complex global web of interrelationships and interdependencies.