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Associate Professor, History/Africana Studies, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York)

Shobana Shankar is Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at Stony Brook. She teaches and conducts research on African cultural history, with a focus on religion, the politics of health and medicine, colonialism, and most recently, African-Asian encounters. She is the author of Who Shall Enter Paradise? Christian Origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, c.1890-1975, Ohio University Press, 2014, and co-editor of Religions on the Move: New Dynamics of Religious Expansion in a Globalizing World (with Afe Adogame), in the International Studies in Religion and Society Series (eds. Peter Beyer and Lori Beaman), Brill, 2012, and Transforming Africa’s Religious Landscapes: The Sudan Interior Mission (SIM), Past and Present (with Tim Geysbeek, Barbara Cooper, et al), Africa World Press, 2018. Her co-edited collections and other recent publications have emerged from collaborations with scholars from Africa, Europe, North America, and Asia. Some of her current research, an interdisciplinary study of Afro-Indian knowledge networks, will appear in Afro-South Asian in the Global African Diaspora (eds. Omar Ali, Kenneth X. Robbins, and Beheroze Schroff), Mapin Press, 2019, and Africans in India: (Re)presentation, Perception and Affinities (eds. Ibrahima Diallo and Kusum Agarwal), Cambridge Scholars Press, 2019. After winning fellowships from the American Historical Association, Fulbright, and Wenner-Gren for her first book, she has conducted research in Ghana, India, Senegal, and Nigeria with support from the Council for American Overseas Research Centers, Africa’s Asian Options (AFRASO) at Goethe University in Frankfurt, and others. In addition to her scholarly work, she has conducted research on childhood and maternal health and gender for UNICEF and serves as an expert witness for asylum cases.

Experience

  • –present
    Associate Professor, History/Africana Studies, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York)

Education

  • 2003 
    University of California, Los Angeles, History--Africa, South Asia, subfield in anthropology