The Paradox of Hunger Strikes

Wolf Humanities Center • University of Pennsylvania

2024–2025 FORUM ON KEYWORDS

The talk considers the keyword "hunger strike" and the historical, social, and political conditions that motivate the rise and transformations of this puzzling and persistent bodily defiance in the 20th and 21st centuries. Investigating contexts from South Africa, India, Ireland, the United States, and Iran, historian Nayan Shah explores the visceral ways that hunger striking communicates through media and political movements, and how it can turn a personal agony into a call for collective action.

is a historian whose books uncover how people struggle with incarceration, migration, and illness in the United States and across the globe. His latest book, Refusal to Eat: A Century of Pr*son Hunger Strikes (University of California Press, 2022), is the first global history of hunger strikes as a tactic in prisons, conflicts, and protest movements. He also wrote Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (2001) and Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West (2001). Shah is Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity and History at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. This year he is L.A. Times' Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library and Research Center.

More information: https://wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/shah

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This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

The Wolf Humanities Center values inclusivity and we aim to create a welcoming environment for people of all backgrounds. Please feel free to note any accessibility needs or concerns in your registration, or connect with us by email or phone (215.573.8280).

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Van Pelt Library, 3420 Walnut St, Philadelphia, United States