School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 11-20 of 39 Results
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Shelley Fisher Fishkin
Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities and Professor, by courtesy, of African and African American Studies
BioShelley Fisher Fishkin is the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at Stanford, where she is also Director of Stanford's American Studies Program and Co-Director of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project. She is the author, editor, or co-editor of forty-eight books and has published over one hundred fifty articles, essays and reviews, many of which have focused on issues of race and racism in America, and on recovering and interpreting voices that were silenced, marginalized, or ignored in America's past. Her books have won awards from Choice, Library Journal, the New York Public Library, and elsewhere. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale. Before coming to Stanford in 2003, she was chair of the American Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research has been featured twice on the front page of the New York Times, and twice on the front page of the New York Times Arts section. In 2017 she was awarded the John S. Tuckey Lifetime Achievement award by the Center for Mark Twain Studies in recognition of her efforts "to assure that a rigorous, dynamic account of Twain stays in the public consciousness," and stated that "Nobody has done more to recruit, challenge, and inspire new generations and new genres of Mark Twain studies." Her most recent book, Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee, came out in 2017. Junot Díaz called it "a triumph of scholarship and passion, a profound exploration of the many worlds which comprise our national canon....a book that redraws the literary map of the United States."
She has served as President of the American Studies Association and the Mark Twain Circle of America, was co-founder of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman society, and was a founding editor of the Journal of Transnational American Studies. She has given keynote talks at conferences in Beijing, Cambridge, Coimbra, Copenhagen, Dublin, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Kunming, Kyoto, La Coruña, Lisbon, Mainz, Nanjing, Regensburg, Seoul, St. Petersburg, Taipei, Tokyo, and across the U.S.
In June 2019, the American Studies Association created a new prize, the "Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies." The prize honors publications by scholars outside the United States that present original research in transnational American Studies. In its announcement of the new award, the ASA said, "Shelley Fisher Fishkin's leadership in creating a crossoads for international scholarly collaboration and exchange has transformed the field of American Studies in both theory and practice. This award honors Professor Fishkin's outstanding dedication to the field by promoting exceptional scholarship that seeks multiple perspectives that enable comprehensive and complex approaches to American Studies, and which produce culturally, socially, and politically significant insights and interpretations relevant to Americanists around the world." In 2023 the American Studies Association awarded Fishkin the "Bode-Pearson Prize for Lifetime Achievement and Outstanding Contribution to the field of American Studies." Her current book projects include a book entitled "Jim (Huckleberry Finn's Comrade)" forthcoming in Yale University Press's "Black Lives" biography series, and a book about Hal Holbrook and Mark Twain. -
Rachel Jean-Baptiste
Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden Family Professor of Feminist and Gender Studies, Professor of History and of African and African American Studies
BioPh.D., Stanford University
M.A., Stanford University
A.B., Bryn Mawr College
Rachel Jean-Baptiste is a historian of 20th and 21st century French-speaking Central and West Africa and the Atlantic world. Her research interests include the histories of: marriage and family law; gender and sexuality; racial thought and multiracial identities; urban history; citizenship. Jean-Baptiste is currently researching the history of women, slavery, and urban history in Haiti and the French-speaking Atlantic world. -
Abdulbasit Kassim
Stanford University Provostial Fellow/Lecturer
BioAbdulbasit Kassim is a Stanford University Provostial Fellow and Lecturer at the Department of African and African American Studies. He is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in the histories and cultures of Muslim societies with a geographical focus on West Africa and the African Diaspora. His cross-temporal research spans the early modern and modern periods. By studying both the “yesterday” and the “today,” he traces the ebbs and flows of the ideas that circulated in Muslim societies in West Africa and the African Diaspora. His research and pedagogical focus aim to bridge the Afrocentric, Black Atlantic, and Black Mediterranean models of African and African Diaspora Studies by synthesizing the historical interconnections between the peoples and cultures of Africa and the experiences of African diasporic communities as they adapt to new lives in the Atlantic World, the Ottoman Empire, and the Mediterranean Arab World and Lands of Islam.
Abdulbasit's current book project, Requiem for a West African Caliphate: A Social and Intellectual History of Islamicate Societies in Hausaland and Bornu, c. 1450-2015, examines the continuities and changes in the longue durée of successive waves of Islamic reform, counter-reform, dissidence, rebellion, and jihad in Muslim West Africa. The nine-chapter book, divided into three parts (early modern, colonial, and post-imperial periods), tracks the textual practices, discursive productions, and doctrinal interpretations that reformers and dissidents in Hausaland and Bornu have debated, enunciated, and deployed to legitimize their projects of reform and jihad from the mid-fifteenth century to the early twenty-first century. His second book project, From the Black Atlantic to Sankoré, examines the multi-directional travel, global networks, and migration of Muslims of African descent from the Black Atlantic and the African Diaspora to the ancient centers of Islamic learning in Western, Central, and Eastern Sudanic Africa. The book traces the intellectual contributions of Black Muslims in the United States, Caribbean, and Latin America to the global transmission, circulation, preservation, and bio-bibliographic documentation of the centuries-old African Islamic intellectual heritage.
Abdulbasit is the co-editor of the book The Boko Haram Reader: From Nigerian Preachers to the Islamic State (Oxford University Press and Hurst Publishers, 2018), nominated for the best critical edition or translation into English of primary source materials on Africa by the African Studies Association (Paul Hair Prize). He has conducted ethnographic and archival research in Nigeria, Senegal, Niger, Mali and Sudan. His work has received support from the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the African Studies Association, among others. He is a member of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), American Historical Association (AHA), African Studies Association (ASA), Association for the Study of Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), Lagos Studies Association (LSA) and Islam in Africa Working Group.
Before coming to Stanford, Abdulbasit completed his PhD at Rice University. He held a postdoctoral research fellowship at New York University’s Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora (CSAAD). He was a postdoctoral scholar for the Mellon Sawyer Seminar “Unarchiving Blackness: Why the Primacy of African and African Diaspora Studies Necessitates a Creative Reconsideration of Archives” at the Center for Ideas and Society University of California, Riverside. He also held a predoctoral fellowship at the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA) and the Program of African Studies (PAS) at Northwestern University. He received an MA from Keele University Newcastle-under-Lyme Staffordshire in England as a Commonwealth Shared Scholar and a BSc from Ahmadu Bello University Zaria in Nigeria as a Bomarah Foundation Scholar.
