Shanya CordisAssistant Professor- WGSS

Shanya Cordis (she/her) is a first-generation Black and Indigenous (Lokono and Warrau) Guyanese American. As a sociocultural anthropologist, she specializes in African & African Diaspora Studies and Native American & Indigenous Studies. Broadly speaking, her research focuses on indigeneity and antiblackness across the Americas and the Caribbean, black and indigenous political subjectivities and resistance, transnational black and indigenous feminisms, and black feminist geographies. Her work examines how colonial and imperial legacies mediate and form the grounds of black and indigenous unfreedoms and liberatory struggles. Her forthcoming manuscript, Unsettling Geographies: Antiblackness, Gendered Violence, and Indigenous Dispossession in Guyana is a critical feminist ethnography that tracks how geographies of racial difference undergird indigenous recognition policies, extractive economies, and neocolonial capitalism, advancing the annexation of indigenous territories and entrenching antiblack logics. Secondly, Unsettling Geographies introduces relational difference, a theoretical framework which captures the social and political entanglements of the afterlives of slavery, conquest, and indentureship and its constitutively gendered and sexualized nature. Through an intersectional analysis of the racial and sexual imaginaries of the body—namely African, Amerindian, and Indian women— this book also traces how gendered violence is relationally configured and central to colonial capitalist expansion disrupting narratives that depict structural forces of dispossession as merely postcolonial remnants or endemic nationalistic struggles. Her second co-edited and co-authored book, Fugitive Anthropology (forthcoming Fall 2025) examines the embodied limits and generative openings that arise from conducting activist ethnographic research in contexts of colonialism, war and conflict, and racial and gendered violence, particularly for racialized queer, trans and gender expansive researchers.

In addition to her research, Dr. Cordis is deeply invested in cultivating collaborative black and indigenous feminist praxis, both in and out of the classroom, to generate more expansive visions of black and indigenous liberation and autonomy. Critical black and indigenous feminisms offer a vital way to analyze movement(s) toward more transformative and decolonial futures, emphasizing how multiple axis of power cisheteropatriarchy, racism, capitalism, and colonialism — work together to structure our societies. In alignment with engaged feminist pedagogy, her research extends to public scholarship engagement, poetry, and creative mediums, with for example, the publication of her co-authored book, Say, Listen: Writing as Care (2023), as a member of the Black|Indigenous 100s Collective, a collective of black and indigenous scholars, artists, and organizers. The book foregrounds the relationship between writing and the body, and how we conceive living in the wake of ongoing global pandemics, anti-Blackness, and Indigenous erasure. As part of her teaching practice, she aims to incorporate teaching methods that cohere theory and praxis and bring the insights of interdisciplinary anthropological research to students’ embodied lived experience. The classroom, beyond being a site of institutional socialization, is as a space for liberatory transformation, challenging students to not only be cognizant of why social inequities persist, but also to imagine and create pathways toward addressing them in their respective avenues of study/interest. Before arriving at Emory, Cordis taught at Columbia University, Spelman College, and the University of Texas at Austin.

Education
PhD, MA Sociocultural Anthropology, concentrations in African & African Diaspora Studies and Native American & Indigenous Studies, University of Texas at Austin

Courses Taught
Black Feminist Geographies (Fall 2024)
Indigeneity of the South: Sovereignty, Colonialism, and Empire (Spring 2025)
Caribbean Hauntings: From Conquest to New Grammars (Spring 2025)