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Shreena Niketa Gandhi, Ph.D.
"Missionaries were often a part of the colonial enterprize” September 15, 2022
Ambereen Khan talks with historian and religious studies professor Dr. Shreena N Gandhi about the legacy of the British Empire and the mixed reactions as King Charles III assumed leadership of the British Crown. Gandhi brings insights from her scholarship and research examining the intersection of race, religion, and empire to decode the headlines.

Dr. Gandhi describes how her grandfather’s spirituality and questions sparked her early interest in studying the relationship between religion, and how her family’s unique lineage is rooted in several lands once colonized by the British Empire.  Reflecting on the struggle to confront colonized thinking both on a personal level and within institutions, Gandhi offers observations on the challenges that persist in higher education and acknowledges the ongoing challenges to reckoning with systems built to reinforce and support supremacist beliefs.

Shreena Niketa Gandhi, Ph.D. Assistant Professor in the Religious Studies Department at Michigan State University, teaching classes on religion and race in the Americas. She has extensively studied the culture of Yoga in the United States and religious seeking in the colonial and post-colonial global south.


Canadian 2¢ stamp from 1898 showing the extent of the British Empire - bearing the legend "We hold a vaster empire than has been".
Canadian 2¢ stamp from 1898
showing the extent of the British Empire - bearing
the legend "We hold a vaster empire than has been."