Tuessday, October 30, 2018 at  4:00 PM, Rm 1008

Nicholas Hoover Wilson - Sociology Department

"The Career of Historical Social Science, 1900-2010: Book Reviews as a Proxy for Interdisciplinary Exchange"

The questions of whether history constitutes a science and how it relates to other fields such as sociology, political science, law, economics, and philosophy have been asked for as long as modern universities have distinguished among these disciplines.  This project aims to shed light on these questions by probing the frequency and quality of interdisciplinary exchange between history and its adjacent disciplines.  Using a unique data set of book reviews from 1900 to 2010, we trace how the same books have been received differently (or not at all!) by different disciplines, and how their reception reveals divergent epistemic cultures.

This is a collaborative project with Jensen Sass, University of Canberra in Australia

For pdf of event flyer, click here.

Nicholas Hoover Wilson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology.  He is a historical sociologist working on corruption, empire, the sociology of knowledge, and the philosophy of social science.  His book manuscript on the East India Company's organizational politics of corruption, Modernity's Corruption, is under contract at Columbia University Press.

Image: Tour of Europe 1924                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Tuesday, November 13, 2018 at  4:00 PM, Rm 1008

Shobana Shankar - History Department

"Questioning Race: Islam and the Erosion of African-Indian Segregation"

To many Africans, Indian migrants, who were known predominantly as merchants and traders living apart from local populations, seemed to be colonialists, or at least beneficiaries of European colonialism. The question of unity between Africans and Indians began to take on new importance as the struggle to end European rule intensified in the 1920s. This talk explores how Islam provided a framework for racial unity which drew on the history of slavery, intermarriage, and class mobility. Contrasting Islamic history with Euro-American history, Islamic multiracialism was promoted as more liberationist than Western democracy. I suggest how African-Indian religious ideas prefigured and actually influenced political discourse after 1948, when independent India supported African independence movements and a broader Third World solidarity.

For pdf of event flyer, click here.

Shobana Shankar’s research focuses on cross-cultural encounters and religious politics in West African and world history. She is the author of Who Shall Enter Paradise? Christian Origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, 1890-1975 and co-editor of two books: Religion on the Move: New Dynamics of Religious Expansion in a Globalizing World and Transforming Africa’s Religious Landscapes: The Sudan Interior Mission (SIM). She is currently writing a book on Afro-Indian entanglements 1920 to the present, focusing on how religion reshaped African relations with Indian businesspeople. She has received fellowships from Fulbright, Wenner-Gren, and the Council for American Overseas Research Centers, and, in 2018, was a fellow at the Humanities Institute of Stony Brook and Africa’s Asian Option at the Goethe Institute in Frankfurt.