{"id":11861,"date":"2011-01-31T00:22:26","date_gmt":"2011-01-31T00:22:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=11861"},"modified":"2011-01-31T00:22:26","modified_gmt":"2011-01-31T00:22:26","slug":"asian-american-studies-building-academic-bridges-nitasha-sharma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=11861","title":{"rendered":"Asian American Studies: Building Academic Bridges – Nitasha Sharma"},"content":{"rendered":"

Asian American Studies: Building Academic Bridges – Nitasha Sharma<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Department of African American Studies
\nNorthwestern University, Evanston Illinois
\nOctober 2010<\/p>\n

Ronald Roach<\/strong><\/p>\n

NITASHA TAMAR SHARMA<\/a> Title: Assistant Professor of African-American and Asian American Studies, Northwestern University Education: Ph.D., Anthropology, University of alifornia at Santa Barbara; M.A., Anthropology, University of California at Santa Barbara; B.A., Anthropology, University of California at Santa Cruz Age: 35<\/em><\/p>\n

With a dual appointment in the African-American Studies department and the Asian American studies program at Northwestern University, Dr. Nitasha Sharma is well positioned to produce scholarship that bridges the two disciplines. Sharma\u2019s forthcoming book, based on her anthropology dissertation, Claiming Space, Making Race: South Asian American Hip Hop Artists, examines the influence that African-American-inspired hip hop culture has had on young musicians of South Asian descent, developing what some scholars see as fertile ground in ethnic studies\u2014cross-cultural and comparative inquiry on U.S. racial and ethnic groups.<\/p>\n

In her third year as an assistant professor at Northwestern, Sharma is regarded as a skillful and popular teacher. Her courses have included \u201cThe Racial and Gender Politics of Hip Hop\u201d; \u201cRace, Crime, and Punishment: The Border, Prisons, and Post-9\/11 Detentions\u201d; and \u201cCracking the Color Lines: Asian and Black Relations in the U.S.\u201d Sharma has also done considerable work on mixed-race populations, including those in the U.S. and Trinidad.<\/strong> The African-American Studies department has awarded its Outstanding Teaching Award to Sharma in both her first and second years.<\/p>\n

In addition, Sharma\u2019s dual appointment has attracted the attention of Asian American studies scholars as well as Asian American student groups nationally and has resulted in numerous speaking engagements for the young professor. \u201c(These individuals and organizations) really want to have the framework to understand the collaborations that my appointment symbolizes,\u201d she says…<\/p>\n

…\u201cNitasha is especially attractive in the way that she complicates our understanding of how race is constructed\u2026 And she is very good at demonstrating the impact of African-American culture and history on diverse populations around the globe,\u201d Hine adds.<\/p>\n

Sharma\u2019s personal background may help explain her rise as a young scholar. She knew as a youngster growing up in Hawaii that she wanted to follow in the footsteps of her parents, both professors. Her father, a retired University of Hawaii history professor and Indian immigrant, and mother, a still-active University of Hawaii anthropologist in Asian studies and Brooklyn, N.Y., native of Russian Jewish descent, met and married in the United Kingdom and settled in Hawaii. \u201cI wanted the life that my parents had. They had summers off and traveled around the world; they were frequently at home during the week days\u2026 The talk at the dinner table was largely about academic life and their work,\u201d Sharma says…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Asian American Studies: Building Academic Bridges – Nitasha Sharma The Department of African American Studies Northwestern University, Evanston Illinois October 2010 Ronald Roach NITASHA TAMAR SHARMA Title: Assistant Professor of African-American and Asian American Studies, Northwestern University Education: Ph.D., Anthropology, University of alifornia at Santa Barbara; M.A., Anthropology, University of California at Santa Barbara; B.A., […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,16,1245,8,20,25],"tags":[5355,5356,5357,5358,5354],"class_list":["post-11861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-asia","category-biography","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-women","tag-nitasha-sharma","tag-nitasha-t-sharma","tag-nitasha-tamar-sharma","tag-northwestern-university","tag-ronald-roach"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11861"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11861\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}