Shanti Parikh

Shanti Parikh is Chair and Professor of African and African American Studies and Professor, Anthropology in the School of Arts & Sciences.

She is the author of Regulating Romance: Youth Love Letters, Moral Anxiety, and Intervention in Uganda’s Time of AIDS, (2016 Vanderbilt University Press)

As well as coauthor on The Secret: Love, Marriage, and HIV (2010 Vanderbilt University Press) with S. Hirsch, H. Wardlow, D. J. Smith, H. M. Phinney, S. Parikh and C. A. Nathanson

Her research focuses on the intersection of local transformations; global processes; and structures of inequalities surrounding issues of sexuality, particularly gender, sexual and reproductive health, regulation, courtship and romance, and marriage. Using ethnographic and historical methods and critical theory, her research in eastern Uganda focuses on how regimes of regulation and discourses of sexuality have shifted since independence and, more recently, during the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

In her fieldwork, she integrates ethnographic research methods with active research techniques. By doing so, she enters into dialogue with debates about the role of anthropology in public health and anthropological critiques of development.

Her courses cross into African and Afro-American Studies, Women’s Studies, International and Area Studies, Social Thought and Analysis, and the History and Philosophy of Science.