Shah is the author of two award-winning books - Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West (University of California Press, 2011) and Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (University of California Press, 2001).
Stranger Intimacy uncovers international migrant’s practices of social navigation, community building, and participation in interethnic social worlds that undermine the containment efforts of nation-states and empires. As a way to understand the larger picture, it follows the experiences of South Asian migrants in collaboration with domestic and international migrants and their struggles over social and intimate relations in the United States and Canada from 1900 to the 1940s.
Contagious Divides examines the problem of citizenship and the governance of modern society through an analysis of public health and Chinese immigration in San Francisco from 1854 to 1952. The portrayal of Chinatown as a nexus of infection, domestic chaos and moral danger reverberated widely in the political and cultural life of San Francisco residents. The book traces how the public health rhetoric of the contagion of Chinatown bachelor society provided white politicians, white middle-class female social reformers, and white male labor leaders the necessary foil against which they were able to elaborate the vision and norms of nuclear family domestic life and a sanitary social order.
Professor Shah’s new project on the Refusal to Eat in Indefinite Detention explores the transnational history of mass hunger strikes. It examines political struggle and medical ethical crises with 20th century and contemporary case studies drawn from U.S. and British suffrage activists, Irish Republicans, Bengali Revolutionaries, Japanese American Internees, South African anti-apartheid activists, Guantanamo prisoners and refugees in Australia, US. and Europe.
A second large-scale research project is a comparative study of transnational spiritual migrations, gender and intimacy in the early twentieth century United States that examines Muslim, Catholic and Hindu missions and the development of interracial spiritual communities in Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago and Seattle. A third project examines how Asian, African, Indigenous and Latin American diasporic artists forge relationships of belonging, refuge and vulnerability with physical landscape and the built environment through art practices of photography, installation, archive and performance. Shah is the former co-editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (Duke University Press). Shah is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, van Humboldt Foundation and Freeman Foundation.