Shanti Singham

Shanti Marie Singham is a historian specializing in modern European history, with a focus on the Francophone world. She was educated at Wolmer’s High School for Girls in Kingston, Jamaica, and then came to the US, where she received her undergraduate education from Howard University and Swarthmore College (1980). Her training at Princeton University, where she received her Ph.D. (1991), was in popular political culture and the social history of ideas in the age of the French Revolution. Having grown up in the Caribbean during the era of independence, nation-building, and Black Power, Singham has tried to stay true to her activist upbringing, from doing a community-based “Oral History of Blacks in Berkshire County,” to being the first faculty sponsor for SOCA (Students of Caribbean Ancestry) at Williams, serving on the National Steering Committee of Historians Against the War during the Bush Wars, organizing teach-ins and national petitions against the Iraq War, and working with students on several presidential elections, especially the Obama campaign