Faculty

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

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 came to Vanderbilt from London, where she was a Research Associate at the Institute for Ismaili Studies (IIS). 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. She completed doctoral research at Oxford in 2004, after which she was a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, until 2006. She has been awarded the Ryskamp Fellowship, by the American Council of Learned Societies, for the 2012-13 academic year.

A historian of South Asia, her research interests include politics and religion in South Asia from 1200-1950, early modern trade, early Indian maps, and long-term relationships between Indian and Indian Ocean societies. She has taught courses on medieval and modern South Asia, Islam in South Asia, Sufism, and on modern literature. 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 is currently working on a book on religious change in early modern western India.

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