Meet the authors of the 65-2 issue, April 2023.
Sarah Balakrishnan is an Assistant Professor of History at Duke University. She received a Ph.D. in African History from Harvard University in 2020. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia as well as the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Sarah’s first book project studies the imperial encounter in southern Ghana through changes to land, space, and political economy. Her research has been published in numerous venues, including the Journal of African History, the Journal of Social History, and the International Journal of African Historical Studies.
Ali-Reza Bhojani is Teaching Fellow in Islamic Ethics and Theology at the University of Birmingham, and honorary Research Fellow the Al-Mahdi Institute. His research, teaching, and writing focuses on intersections between Islamic legal theory, theology, and ethics. His doctoral study, conducted at Durham University, was published as Moral Rationalism and Shari’a (Routledge, 2015). More recent publications include the co-edited volume Visions of Sharīʿa (Brill, 2020).
Roberta Bivins is Professor of History at the University of Warwick. Her work has focused on Britain as a node in extensive global networks of migration and exchange from the late seventeenth century until the present. Bivins’ first two books examined the cross-cultural transmission of medical expertise, particularly in relation to global and alternative medicine: Acupuncture, Expertise and Cross-Cultural Medicine (Palgrave, 2000); and Alternative Medicine? A History (Oxford University Press, 2007). Since 2004, funded by the Wellcome Trust, she has studied the impacts of immigration and ethnicity on postwar British health, medical research, and practice (Contagious Communities: Medicine, Migration and the NHS in Post War Britain, Oxford University Press, 2015). Since 2015, she has explored the cultural history of the NHS, including its reception in the USA; its visual culture of race; involvement in migrant screening; and state and public attitudes toward overweight people in the NHS era.
Morgan Clarke is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Keble College. He is the author of Islam and New Kinship: Reproductive Technology and the Shariah in Lebanon (Berghahn, 2009); and Islam and Law in Lebanon: Sharia within and without the State (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and a co-editor of Rules and Ethics: Perspectives from Anthropology and History (Manchester University Press, 2021).
Kevin P. Donovan is a Lecturer in the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh. He is completing a book entitled “The Government of Value: Money, Smuggling, and Decolonization in East Africa.” He has also written on the politics of contemporary financialization, infrastructure, and corporate power in Kenya and South Africa. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology and History from the University of Michigan. His research is available at https://kevinpdonovan.com/
Caroline Ford is Professor of European History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her most recent book, Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France was published by Harvard University Press in 2016 and appeared in French as Naissance de l’écologie (Alma Editeur, 2018). She is currently working on two book-length projects. One is an environmental history of Paris, commissioned by Oxford University Press, and the other focuses on social and environmental dimensions of architectural modernism in Paris in the sphere of social housing.
Nana Osei-Opare earned his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2019, and is an intellectual, cultural, social, and diplomatic historian at Fordham University. During the 2022–2023 academic year, he is a Mellon Fellow for Assistant Professors at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies at the School of Historical Studies, completing his book manuscript, “Socialist De-Colony: Soviet & Black Entanglements in Ghana’s Decolonization and Cold War Projects, 1957–66.” His work has appeared in many places, including the Journal of African History, the Journal of West African History, the Washington Post, Foreign Policy Magazine, and Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies.
Ayşe Parla is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Boston University. Her first book, Precarious Hope: Migration and the Limits of Belonging in Turkey (Stanford University Press, 2019) received an Honorable Mention from the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology’s Book Prize. Her work has also appeared in such journals as Alternatives, American Ethnologist, Citizenship Studies, Differences, History and Anthropology, International Migration,and Public Culture. Her current book project is on ghosts, empirical fabulation, vengeance, and the Armenian Genocide.
Audrey Truschke is Associate Professor of South Asian History at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. Her research focuses on the cultural, imperial, and intellectual history of medieval and early modern India as well as the politics of history in modern times. She is the author of three books: Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court(Columbia University Press, 2016); Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India’s Most Controversial King (Stanford University Press, 2017); and The Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives of Indo-Muslim Rule (Columbia University Press, 2021). Culture of Encounters won the John F. Richards prize from the American Historical Association for the most distinguished work of scholarship on South Asian history in 2017. Dr. Truschke believes in talking about history outside the ivory tower, and so you can find her on Twitter (@audreytruschke) and in her public-facing scholarship.
Farzin Vejdani is an Associate Professor of Middle Eastern History at Toronto Metropolitan University. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University’s Department of History in 2009, before becoming an Assistant Professor of Iranian history at the University of Arizona (2009–2014). Dr. Vejdani was recently a Visiting Fellow at Massey College (2021–2022). In 2019–2020, he was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World. He is currently completing a book-length monograph tentatively titled “Private Sins, Public Crimes: Policing, Punishment, and Authority in Iran.” His book, Making History in Iran: Education, Nationalism, and Print Culture (Stanford University Press, 2014) received an Honorable Mention for the Houshang Pourshariati Iranian Studies Book Award. In his other publications, Dr. Vejdani has explored the themes of everyday urban crime, folklore, transnational Persian print networks, and connected histories of the Ottoman Empire, India, and Iran.
