Shobana Shankar

Shobana Shankar is Professor of History at Stony Brook, State University of New York. Her research focuses on colonial and postcolonial West Africa and Africa-South Asia networks and covers themes related to religious and racial politics, humanitarianism, history of health and diseases, intellectual history, and critical development studies. She just concluded a fellowship in the Africa Program at the Wilson International Center for Scholars, where she worked on her next book on centuries-old informal economies and the making of multidirectional migration of people, goods, and ideas between Nigeria and India. This book builds in new directions from her book An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the Spectre of Race, published by Hurst/Oxford in 2021. It is the first history of how race and racialization have brought Africans and Indians together, yet also driven them apart; it was shortlisted as a finalist for the P. Sterling Stuckey Prize of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora and the International Studies Association’s Global Development Section Book Award. She also writes for wider audiences on policy blogs such as the Foreign Policy Research Institute and London School of Economics blogs, Africa as a Country, the Conversation, Washington Post, and others