DEPARTMENT OF BLACK STUDIES

Areas of Research

Black Pacific, Comparative Race Studies, Hawai‘i, Asian and Black Relations, Afro-Asian Studies, Black Studies and Native Studies, Black Popular Culture, Hip Hop Studies, South Asian American Studies, Critical Mixed Race Studies, Ethnography, Immigration and Diaspora, Race and Indigeneity

Courses:

Spring 2025: Black Studies 380 “Race, Crime, and Punishment: The Border, US Prisons, and Post-9/11 Detentions” (Northwestern Prison Education Program)

Spring 2025: Asian American Studies 107, First Year Writing Seminar: “Multiracial Pacific Islanders and Asian Americans.”

Campus Affiliation:

Nitasha Sharma has a courtesy appointment in Performance Studies and is an affiliate of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research (CNAIR), and American Studies. She is a former fellow of the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, CNAIR, the Council for Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), and the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs.

Research:

Nitasha Tamar Sharma is a comparative race studies scholar who offers an interdisciplinary, comparative, and ethnographic approach to the study of difference, inequality, and racism. Her teaching, research, and writing contests inter-minority racisms by ethnographically detailing existing models of cross-racial solidarities among nonWhite groups. Highlighting historical crossovers, comparative or relational racialization, and expansive political orientations, Sharma’s work imagines liberated futures for all people. 

Nitasha Sharma is the author of two books and co-editor of two volumes. Her ethnography of the lives and perspectives of Hawai‘i’s Black residents, Hawai‘i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific, was published by Duke University Press in 2021. Two questions frame this ten-year project: What does the Pacific offer people of African descent? And how does the racial lens of African Americans illuminate inequalities, including antiBlack racism, in the islands? Bringing into conversation Black Studies, Native Studies, Pacific Islands Studies, and Critical Mixed Race Studies, it charts how Hawai‘i’s Black residents including Black hapas negotiate race, indigeneity, and culture.

Her first book, Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global Race Consciousness (Duke University Press 2010), analyzes South Asian American and Black relations through hip hop. Based on multi-sited ethnography, Sharma reveals the development of South Asian youths’ racial consciousness in cities across the US as they adopt hip hop culture as MCs, DJs, and hip hop engineers to articulate their politics and commitments to Black communities. 

Sharma is the co-editor of two additional books: Beyond Ethnicity: New Politics of Race in Hawai‘i (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018) and Who Is the Asianist?: The Politics of Representation in Asian Studies (Columbia University Press, 2022). She is the co-editor of a special issue of Critical Ethnic Studies Journal on “Interventions in Pacific Islands Studies and Trans-Pacific Studies,” Vol. 7, No. 2 (November 2021).

Dr. Sharma served on the Executive Committee and National Council of the American Studies Association and the Executive Board of the Association for Asian American Studies. She is on the editorial board of American Quarterly, for which she served as Associate Editor. Sharma teaches courses including: “Black Studies, Native Studies, Asian Settler Colonialism,” “Hip Hop Studies,” “Asian/Black Relations in the US,” and “Introduction to Critical Mixed Race Studies.”

Select Awards:

Faculty Fellow, Council for Race and Ethnic Studies (2025-2026) 

Buffett Institute for Global Affairs Faculty Fellow (2023-2024)

Faculty Fellow, Center for Native American and Indigenous Research (2021-2022)

Kaplan Fellow, Kaplan Institute for the Humanities

National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) Summer Stipend

Associated Student Government Faculty Teaching Award

Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence Award

Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Grant

National Emerging Scholar, Diverse: Issues in Higher Education

Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award, Northwestern University

Outstanding Teaching Award, African American Studies, Northwestern University

Publications:

Hawai'i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific, Duke University Press, 2021.

"Center-to-Center Relationalities: At the Nexus of Pacific Islands Studies and Trans-Pacific Studies," Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Special Issue, Jinah Kim and Nitasha Sharma, eds. Vol. 7, No. 2, 2021.

"Over two centuries: Black people in nineteenth-century Hawai'i," American Nineteenth Century History, Vol. 20, No. 2 (2019): 115-140.

Beyond Ethnicity: New Politics of Race in Hawai'i, Camilla Fojas, Rudy Guevarra, and Nitasha Sharma, eds. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018.

Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global Race Consciousness, Duke University Press, 2010.

“Feminist and Queer Afro-Asian Formations: Preface.” The Scholar & Feminist Online (S&F Online), Vol. 14, No. 3 (2018).

“Epilogue: The When and Where of Critical Mixed Race Studies,” in Red and Yellow, Black and Brown: Decentering Whiteness in Mixed Race Studies, eds. Paul Spickard, Joanne Rondilla, and Rudy Guevarra. Rutgers University Press, 2017.

“The Ethnic Studies Project: Asian American Studies and the #BLM Campus,” in Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, Cathy Schlund-Vials, ed. Fordham University Press, 2017.

"Epilogue: Racialization and Resistance: The Double Bind of Post-9/11 Brown," in South Asian Racialization and Belonging after 9/11: Masks of Threat, ed. Aparajita De. Lexington Press, MD., 2016.

"Hip Hop Music-Anti/Racism-Empire: Post 9/11 Brown and a Critique of U.S. Empire," Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique. Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan, eds., 2016.

“Brown.” Keywords for Asian American Studies. Cathy Schlund-Vials, Linda Trinh Vo, and K. Scott Wong, eds. New York University Press, 2015.

“Asian Black Relations.” Asian American Society. Mary Danico, Anthony Ocampo, eds. SAGE Publications, 2014.

"Marketing MCs: South Asian American Rappers Negotiate Image, Audience, Artistic Control and Capital." Popular Music and Society, Vol. 36, no. 5. (2013): 637-658.

"Pacific Revisions of Blackness: Blacks Address Race and Belonging in Hawai'i."Amerasia Journal, Vol. 37, No. 3 (2011):  43-60.

"Polyvalent Voices: Ethnic and Racialized Desi Hip Hop," In Desi Rap: South Asian Americans in Hip Hop, Ajay Nair and Murali Balaji, eds. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers/Lexington Books, 2008:17-32

"Down by Law: The Effects and Responses of Copyright Restrictions on Sampling in Rap." In the Journal of Political and Legal Anthropology. Vol 22, No. 1 (May 1999): 1-13. (Winner of the 1998 APLA Student Paper Prize)