Shobana Shankar

Shobana Shankar’s research and teaching explore social and cultural history, religious transformations, minority communities, and international humanitarianism in Africa, with a focus on West Africa and African-South Asian networks and diasporas. She is the author of ‘An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the Spectre of Race’ (Hurst/Oxford, 2021). She is working on her next book that focuses more closely on the local meanings of Afro-Asian trade—based on a study of how Nigerians and Indians refashioned the centuries-old European cloth trade between their regions into thriving networks for petty traders, pastors, and students creating precarious livelihoods between places.