Dr. Shamika Shabnam received her Ph.D. in June 2023 from the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Canada. Her doctoral dissertation, Fragmented Memories: Muktijoddha Masculinity, the Freedom Fighter, and the Birangona-Ma in the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, examines wartime trauma, nationalist discourse, and gender narratives surrounding the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War.
Central to her work is the figure of the muktijoddha ("Freedom Fighter"), who engaged in armed resistance, and the birangona ("War Heroine") women who survived multiple forms of militarized violation during the Liberation War and whose stories have been suppressed from collective nationalist memory.
She also holds a Master of Arts (M.A.) in Postcolonial Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of Leeds, United Kingdom, and a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in English from the University of Leicester, United Kingdom. She is currently in the final stages of her first scholarly monograph, Remembering the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War: History, Memory and Gender (forthcoming 2026–2027), to be published by Routledge in the South Asian Literature in Focus series (Series Editors: Goutam Karmakar, Puspa Damai, Payel Pal, and Deimantas Valančiūnas).
She is also contributing a journal article, "Muktijouddha and Motherhood: The Patriotic Mother and Memories of the Birangona-Ma," to Bad Reputations? Feminist Pedagogy and the (Non)Frivolity of Popular Genres, a special issue of The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, edited by Sarah Brophy and S. Trimble.
Core Areas
- Postcolonial Studies
- Cultural Studies
- South Asian Literatures
- South Asian Masculinity Studies
- Trauma & Memory Studies
- Gender & Nationalist Studies
- Partition Studies
- Feminist Studies
Themes
- Women's Narratives
- Motherhood
- Gender
- Religion & Partition
- Language & Culture
- Diasporic Writing
- Feminist Criticism
Institutions
- Capilano University
- McMaster University
- University of Leeds
- University of Leicester
Remembering to Forget
Co-authored with Dr. Chandrima Chakraborty. Examines how wartime mothers in Tahmima Anam's A Golden Age are simultaneously valorized and erased within nationalist discourse surrounding the Bangladesh Liberation War.
Modernist Transitions
Traces cultural encounters between British and Bangla modernist fiction from the 1910s through the 1950s, mapping how literary modernism traveled across colonial and postcolonial boundaries.
Speaking in Fragments
Shamika has produced Chapter 12 in this edited Routledge volume. The chapter examines the birangona-mother's traumatic memories of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War how survivors speak, how they are heard, and how official memory has fragmented their testimony.
Stitches From The Past
An original poem exploring memory, history, and the intergenerational threads of the past.
The Shifting Sītā in Pinjar
Analyzes the political representation of the Hindu woman during the 1947 India-Pakistan Partition in Chandra Prakash Dwivedi's 2003 film Pinjar, tracing how the mythological figure of Sita from the Rāmāyaṇa is mobilized and destabilized in the film's feminist reimagining.
Fragmented Memories
Doctoral dissertation housed in McMaster's open-access MacSphere repository. The central work from which her published articles on birangona narratives and wartime memory have grown.
- Instructor, English (2024 – Current) Capilano University
- Instructor, Historical Studies | South Asian Studies (2024) University of Toronto
- Instructor, English & Cultural Studies | Gender & Social Justice (2020 – 2024) McMaster University