ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES PROGRAM

Faculty Affiliate of Performance Studies, Center for Native American and Indigenous Research, American Studies, and Black Studies (former department 2006-2025). 

Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence (2013-2016)

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: 

(on sabbatical 2025-2026)

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), American Studies, and her former department of twenty years, Black 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. Nitasha Sharma also teaches for the Northwestern Prison Education Program (NPEP) beginning in 2025.

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 and a journal issue of Critical Ethnic Studies.  

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 (Duke UP 2021) addresses two questions: 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. This book was supported by a summer research grant from the National Institute for the Humanities which also selected this book for its open access program, the Fellowships Open Book Program.  
 
Her first book, Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global Race Consciousness (Duke UP 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 UP 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). 

Sharma is currently co-authoring several publications with several undergraduate students from Northwestern University, including a Forum Response for American Quarterly with her students in NPEP and two chapters for the Foundations and Futures high school textbook on Pacific Islanders and Asian Americans published out of UCLA.  
 
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 is recently teaching courses including: “Black Studies, Native Studies, Asian Settler Colonialism,” “Race, Crime, and Punishment: The Border, Prisons, and Post-9/11 Detentions,) “Asian/Black Relations in the US,” and “Introduction to Critical Mixed Race Studies.” 

 

Select Awards: 

Faculty Fellow for: 

-Council for Race and Ethnic Studies (2025-2026)  

-Buffett Institute for Global Affairs (2023-2024) 

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

- Kaplan Institute for the Humanities 

National Endowment for the Humanities Open Book Program Fellowship 

National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Stipend 

Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Grant 

Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence Award 

Weinberg Distinguished Teaching Award, Northwestern University 

Associated Student Government Faculty Teaching Award 

National Emerging Scholar, Diverse: Issues in Higher Education 

Outstanding Teaching Award, African American Studies, Northwestern University 

 

Select 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). 
 
“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. 
 
"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. 
 
"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