Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Study: Changing Notions of the Sexual Self

Nayan Shah, Professor of American Studies And Ethnicity

Nayan Shah's research examines historical struggles over bodies, space and the exercise of state power from the mid- 19th to the 21st century. His scholarship has contributed to studies of race, sexuality and gender and to the history of migration, health, law and governance. Shah is the author of two award-winning books - Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West (University of California Press, 2011) and Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (University of California Press, 2001).  Professor Shah's new project on the Refusal to Eat in Indefinite Detention, explores the transnational history of mass hunger strikes, and political struggle and medical ethical crises with 20th century and contemporary case studies drawn from U.S. and British suffrage activists, Irish Republicans, Bengali Revolutionaries, Japanese American Internees, South African anti-apartheid activists, Guantanamo prisoners and refugees in Australia, US. and Europe. A second large-scale research project is a comparative study of transnational spiritual migrations, gender and intimacy in the early twentieth century United States that examines Muslim, Catholic and Hindu missions and the development of interracial spiritual communities in Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago and Seattle. Shah is the former co-editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (Duke University Press). Shah is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, van Humboldt Foundation and Freeman Foundation.

For more information, please visit: https://polymathic.usc.edu