Abikal Borah

Assistant Professor
Office: AL 557 | Phone: (619) 594-1121
Email: [email protected]

Abikal Borah is an Assistant Professor of History. Before joining SDSU, he was a Public History Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University. He completed his graduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin where his doctoral dissertation was awarded the Outstanding Dissertation Award for Humanities and Fine Arts as well as the Lathrop Prize for being the best dissertation in history. His research focuses on entangled histories of race and violence in modern South Africa. His current book project, titled Violence of the Wretched: Origins of the Durban Riots of 1949, draws on extensive archival research conducted in Durban, Johannesburg, Pietermaritzburg, and Pretoria. Exploring histories of migration, land, and labor in the province of Natal since the mid-nineteenth century, this monograph explains the social origins of the racial violence between the Zulus and the Indians in the port city of Durban in 1949. At SDSU he offers specialized courses in African history centered on themes such as violence and colonialism, history and memory, and Africa’s oceanic connections as well as a methodological course on ideas of history. In 2021-22, he was selected as an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow. His peer-reviewed work has appeared in Africa Today, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, and Review: Fernand Braudel Center.