Rate My Professor Arafaat Valiani

Arafaat Valiani is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Oregon, where he also serves as Graduate Faculty in the Department of Indigenous, Race and Ethnic Studies and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Sociology’s Global Health Program. He earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2005, an M.A. from the London School of Economics and School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and a B.F.A. from Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. Previously, he was Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Williams College. In 2023, he was Killam Laureate and Visiting Scholar in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary.

Valiani’s teaching and research focus on the social and historical investigation of the life sciences, with regional specializations in South Asia and its diasporas, particularly in North America. He leads a collaborative team contributing to health equity and the medical humanities through research on human genomics and community engagement, informing debates on biotechnology’s role in public health policy. As Principal Investigator and founder of the Precision Health Equity Project, his work addresses decolonization of biomedicine, precision medicine among Indigenous peoples in Canada and South Asians globally, histories of obstetrics in postcolonial India, and health access in maternal and infant care. His first book, Militant Publics in India: Physical Culture and Violence in the Making of a Modern Polity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), examines the effects of medical, ethno-religious, and masculine conceptions of the body on political community in modern India and its diasporas. Recent publications include “Precision health equity for racialized communities” (International Journal for Equity in Health, 2023) and “Frontiers of Bio-Decolonization: Indigenous Data Sovereignty as a Possible Model for Community-Based Participatory Genomic Health Research for Racialized Peoples in Postgenomic Canada” (Genealogy, 2022). Valiani has received major awards including a 2024 National Endowment for the Humanities grant, National Science Foundation support, Ford Foundation fellowship, Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress, Wenner-Gren Foundation grant, American Institute of Indian Studies fellowship, and Oregon Humanities Fellowship.