Faculty

Samira Sheikh
Associate Professor of History
Affiliated Faculty, Asian Studies Program
Affiliated Faculty, Islamic Studies Program

D.Phil., Oxford, 2004

South Asian history.

Telephone:  615-322-4740
Email:  samira.sheikh@vanderbilt.edu
Office Hours: On leave 2012-2013
Office: 223 Benson Hall

Samira Sheikh is a historian of South Asia. Her research interests include politics and religion in South Asia from 1200-1950, early modern trade, and early Indian maps. She is the author of Forging a Region: Sultans, Traders and Pilgrims in Gujarat, 1200-1500 (Oxford India, 2010), and co-editor of An Anthology of Ismaili Literature: A Shi`i Vision of Islam (I.B. Tauris and the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2008).

She has an undergraduate degree in history from Maharaja Sayajirao University, in Baroda, India, and MA and MPhil degrees from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. After doctoral research at Oxford, she held a Junior Research Fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford, until 2006. She came to Vanderbilt from London where she was a research associate at the Institute of Ismaili Studies. She was awarded the Ryskamp Fellowship by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) for the 2012-13 academic year. She is currently working on two books: the first on Vaishnavism and religious change in early modern western India, and the other on an eighteenth century Gujarati entrepreneur-politician.

Courses taught:
HIST 116 Modern South Asia 1750-1950
HIST 288d Images of India
HIST 211a The Mughal World
HIST 212a India and the Indian Ocean
HIST 297 Junior Honors Seminar