Event

The Wolf Humanities Center presents the Forum on Keywords Series featuring Nayan Shah, Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity and History, University of Southern California. 

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The talk considers the keyword "hunger strike" 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, historian Nayan 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.

Featured Speaker

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.

The Wolf Humanities Center is Penn’s main hub for interdisciplinary humanities research and public programming. Established in 2017 by a gift from Noelle and Dick Wolf, the center grew out of the Penn Humanities Forum, founded by Wendy Steiner in 1999. Our goals are to demonstrate how vital the humanities are to the life of the mind and the health of society, and how fundamentally connected they are with many areas of urgent inquiry in medicine, law, business, and the sciences.