Rate My Professor Shameem Black

Shameem Black is Associate Professor and Head of the Program in Gender, Media and Cultural Studies in the School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific, at the Australian National University. She earned a BA in History from Yale University and a PhD in Literature from Stanford University. Before joining ANU, she was an Assistant Professor of postcolonial literature in the English Department at Yale University. Black also serves as Deputy Director for Education in her school and Deputy Director of the ANU South Asia Research Institute.

Her scholarship integrates critical and creative methods in literary, gender, and cultural studies to explore the ethics and politics of cross-cultural encounters, with a focus on contemporary India and its diaspora. Central themes encompass yoga studies, feminist critique, memory studies, and innovative research practices. Black authored Fiction Across Borders: Imagining the Lives of Others in Late Twentieth-Century Novels (Columbia University Press, 2010), which investigates how global novels depict socially diverse figures without recourse to stereotypes or exoticism. Her second monograph, Flexible India: Yoga's Cultural and Political Tensions (Columbia University Press, 2024), employs yoga to illuminate competing visions of Indianness amid global migration, expanding capitalism, histories of violence, and aspirations for intercultural exchange; it received an Honorable Mention from the Association for Asian American Studies. She has published articles in Public Culture, South Asia, Memory Studies, Social Text, and other venues, including recent pieces such as 'Being Worlded: Empathy and the Superhuman Strength of Opening Up' (Journal of World Literature, 2025), 'Activating memory of Manus through strands of basket-making' (Memory Studies, 2024), and 'Commonwealth, empire and critique in South Asia' (Literature, Critique and Empire Today, 2024). Black co-edited a special issue of Memory Studies on Memory, Activism and the Arts in Asia and the Pacific (2024, with Rosanne Kennedy and Lia Kent), serves as co-editor of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, and co-convenes MemoryHub@ANU. She contributed as co-investigator to the project Memory Activism in Australia and the Asia-Pacific (2018-2021).