Heather J. Sharkey

Her books and articles have covered topics relating to nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, postcolonial studies, missionary movements, religious communities, and language politics, especially in Egypt and Sudan.

She won a Marshall Scholarship from the British government and attended Durham University, where she earned an MPhil degree in Modern Middle East Studies.

She considers how these policies evolved or persisted amid social changes and reforms of the nineteenth century, some of which ostensibly tried to promote religious equality while advancing ideas about citizenship.

Ultimately, she considers how religion “worked” as a framework for government and society, and how it shaped social attitudes and expectations in the years leading up to World War I – with consequences for the Middle East in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

[11] The second, Cultural Conversions: Unexpected Consequences of Christian Missionary Encounters in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, appeared from Syracuse University Press in 2013.

[18] Her own article in this collection traces the life and “afterlives” of a giraffe who went from Sudan to France in 1826 (and whose skeleton still stands on display in the Muséum d'Histoire naturelle de La Rochelle).

[19] Upon graduating from Yale, Sharkey became a Marshall Scholar to the United Kingdom, where she attended Durham University and earned an MPhil degree in Modern Middle Eastern Studies.