Investiture Spotlight: Shalini Shankar

Shalini Shankar - Stanley G. Harris Endowed Professor in the Social Sciences 

One of the highlights of our spring quarter was the May 13th Investiture celebrating our own Dr. Shalini Shankar as the Stanley G. Harris Endowed Professor in the Social Sciences. This honor recognizes Shalini’s extraordinary scholarship and her immense contributions in teaching and mentoring here at Northwestern.   

Shalini is Professor of Anthropology and the past Director of the Asian American Studies Program.  She joined Northwestern in 2007 after holding a faculty position at Binghamton University.  She has since published three field-defining books, edited several others, and received grants from the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and been awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. From 2020-23, Shalini was honored as the Martin J. and Patricia Koldyke Outstanding Teaching Professor, and last year, she was recognized with the Weinberg Community Builder Teaching Award.  

Weinberg College Investiture Ceremony | May 13, 2026.

Her work has focused on the lives of the young, which she studies through the medium of language, media, and the ethnography of everyday life.  Her scholarship explores how young people navigate race, migration, class aspiration, competition and belonging in contemporary America. Each of her studies -- of South Asian youth in Silicon Valley, the culture of spelling bees, advertising industries, and the racial politics of media – explores how large historical forces are refracted through ordinary practices: how people speak, compete, consume, perform, and imagine themselves in the world.  Through this close attention to interaction and lived experience, she shows how everyday people – including young people – encounter the important social, political and economic forces that shape their lives in intimate, everyday form: as things encountered in classrooms, advertisements, family expectations, competitions, and social life itself. Her delightful writing makes her work accessible, compelling, and publicly relevant. It has shaped conversations not only within anthropology, Asian American Studies, and linguistic anthropology, but also in broader public discussions about education, race, youth culture, and inequality in the United States.  

In the Anthropology Department, Shalini is the senior member and shaping force of the Linguistic Anthropology program at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. She has been exceptionally generous in taking on advisees, all of whom can count on her well-informed and decisive advice; in her classrooms, students enjoy her lively, funny, and cogent teaching style as they not only learn about American society and about the structural forces shaping their world, but are also given the vocabulary and analytical tools to understand and critically engage it.  All of us, her colleagues, students, and fellow department members, have come to recognize and celebrate her many contributions to our program.