Event
The Paradox of Hunger Strikes
Nayan Shah, Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity and History, University of Southern California
Co-sponsored event
The Paradox of Hunger Strikes
Nayan Shah
Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity and History, University of Southern California
Wednesday, November 13, 2024, 5:30–7:00pm
Class of 1978 Orrery Pavilion, Van Pelt Library, 6th floor
Livestream available
Historian Nayan Shah considers hunger strikes and the historical, social, and political conditions that motivate the rise and transformations of this puzzling and persistent bodily defiance in the 20th and 21st centuries. Investigating contexts from South Africa, India, Ireland, the United States, and Iran, Shah explores the visceral ways that hunger striking communicates through media and political movements, and how it can turn a personal agony into a call for collective action.
Cosponsored by The Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy, the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC), and the Department of History.
Nayan Shah is a historian whose books uncover how people struggle with incarceration, migration, and illness in the United States and across the globe. His latest book, Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes (University of California Press, 2022), is the first global history of hunger strikes as a tactic in prisons, conflicts, and protest movements. He also wrote Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (2001) and Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West (2001). Shah is Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity and History at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. This year he is L.A. Times' Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library and Research Center.
