Rate My Professor Abikal Borah

Abikal Borah is an Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History at San Diego State University. Before joining SDSU, he held a Public History Initiative Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. in History from The University of Texas at Austin in 2021, where his dissertation earned the Outstanding Dissertation Award for Humanities and Fine Arts and the Lathrop Prize as the best dissertation in history. Additional degrees include an M.A. in History from UT Austin (2015), M.Phil. in Comparative Literature from the University of Delhi (2010), M.A. in English Literature (2008), and B.A. in English Literature (2006) from the University of Delhi.

Borah's research centers on the entangled histories of race and violence in modern South Africa. His book project, Violence of the Wretched: Origins of the Durban Riots of 1949, investigates the social origins of racial violence between Zulus and Indians in Durban, drawing on archival research conducted in Durban, Johannesburg, Pietermaritzburg, and Pretoria, and exploring histories of migration, land, and labor in the province of Natal since the mid-nineteenth century. He received a National Endowment for the Humanities award (HB-302104-25) for research and writing leading to this book. He was selected as an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow in 2021-22. Key publications include the co-edited volume Imagining Vernacular Histories: Essays in Honor of Toyin Falola (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020); "Refashioning Gender Relations: Materiality of Love and Sex in Contemporary Nollywood" in Africa Today (2019); "Pluralizing the Narrative: Reconfiguring ‘Vernacular Modernism’ in Assamese Literary Culture" in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (2018); "A Region in a Mobile World: Integration of Southeastern sub-Himalayan Region into Global Capitalist Economy (1820-1900)" in Review: Fernand Braudel Center (2014); "African Philosophies of History and Historiography" in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (2019); and "Capitalist Flows and Working-Class Conditions: Colonial Labor Management and Racial Formations in Southeastern Africa, 1851-1900" in Journal of African History (2025). His book Violence in the Postcolony: Entangled Histories of Africa is forthcoming from Indiana University Press (2026). At SDSU, he teaches specialized courses in African history on themes such as violence and colonialism, history and memory, race and colonialism, colonial studies as global history, and ideas of history.