Dear Everyone:

Our next RevAmStudies event — a seminar featuring Professor Nayan Shah — will focus on his new book, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West (UC Press).  A brief bio is below.  Please drop either of us a note if you’d like the readings for this seminar.  We’ll meet on Friday, 24 February, from 12:30-2 in 8201.01 as usual.  Looking forward to seeing you there!

Best,
Kandice & Duncan

The author of Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (UC Press 2001), Professor Shah’s research and teaching investigates the paradoxes of democracy and inequality in the 19th and 20th century United States and Canada.  He approaches the history of western North America in the 19th and 20th centuries as a place where ethnic, national, gender and sexual identities, communities and practices are forged and recreated through the forces of capitalist political economy, competing state formations and the cultural and social transformations of migration. He explores the waves of Asian migrations along the Pacific Coast of North America and the U.S.-Mexican border region.

His books and articles examine the contests over state power and citizenship in public health, law, and social welfare from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century in the United States and Canada. His works focuses on the dynamics of racialization and the perpetuation and reproduction of inequity in the distribution of resources, wealth, entitlements and state protection. His research has contributed new methods and interpretations of how racialization is constituted and perpetuated in political, cultural and state arenas by divergent conceptualizations of gender  sexuality and domesticity, which have justified the disparate allocation of resources and protections.