Shameem Black

Shameem joined the Australian National University from the United States, where she received her PhD from Stanford University and served as an Assistant Professor of postcolonial literature in the English Department at Yale University. Her research and teaching focus on globalization and ethics in contemporary Anglophone literature and culture, with particular attention to South Asia, Asian diasporas, and the cultural work of English in Asia. In her research, she's concerned to understand the significance of cosmopolitan encounters in our contemporary world. Her book, Fiction Across Borders: Imagining the Lives of Others in Late Twentieth-Century Novels (Columbia University Press, 2010), shows how novels from different parts of the world try to represent socially diverse people and places without stereotyping, idealizing, or exoticising them. Shameem's current work focuses on the cultural politics of globalising yoga. Exploring a range of contemporary literature, visual culture, and new media, her project asks how yoga helps create social meaning in a globalizing world.