Shami Ghosh

Shami Ghosh is an Indian-born historian who is Associate Professor at the Centre for Medieval Studies and Department of History at the University of Toronto. He researches Marxist history and the history of Germanic-speaking Europe.

Biography
Shami Ghosh was born in India. He received his BA (2003) in German at King's College London in 2003, his MA (2005) and PhD (2010) in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto, and his LMS (2016) from the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Since 2016, Ghosh is Associate Professor at the Centre for Medieval Studies and Department of History at the University of Toronto.

Theories
The research of Ghosh centers on Marxist history and the history of Germanic-speaking Europe. He has published the monographs Kings' Sagas and Norwegian History (2011) and Writing The Barbarian Past (2015). In the latter monograph, Ghosh argues that the only thing early Germanic peoples had in common was speaking Germanic languages, but that these linguistic similarities are insignificant. He denies that early Germanic peoples shared a common culture or identity, and believes that they only shared cultural similarities because mutual intelligibility facilitated cultural exchanges between them. . "The works studied in his monograph relate historical matter pertaining to peoples who spoke Germanic languages, and these works have traditionally been valued for their preservation of Germanic lore and legend, but Ghosh prefers to characterize the past represented in them as 'barbarian' rather than 'Germanic.'... Since these works are preserved in Germanic vernaculars, Ghosh entertains no doubts about their content deriving from Germanic oral traditions. Yet the anti-Germanic thread of his book is continued... [T]he fact that medieval Germanic peoples told stories about other, distant Germanic peoples does not, according to Ghosh, reflect identification with those peoples or any perception of ethnic similarity. It is solely a matter of linguistic convenience... Ghosh’s anti-Germanic arguments are often plausible... It is doubtful, however, whether his arguments will have much of an impact... One must wonder whether any adjectives used to describe cultural phenomena in medieval studies (e.g., Celtic, Romance, Byzantine, Carolingian) could withstand the kind of scrutiny that Ghosh has applied to the term 'Germanic.' The term will doubtless continue to be used because it is useful... If 'Germanic' is to be abandoned because Germanic tradition contains non-Germanic elements, then all of the other ethno-linguistic adjectives employed in medieval studies must surely be scrapped as well.... Despite Ghosh’s claims to the contrary, the negative fixation on the term 'Germanic' among medieval historians such as himself still appears to be 'a matter of the ideological baggage it carries'... Although Ghosh’s predilection for anti-Germanic readings occasionally entangles him in improbabilities, Writing the Barbarian Past remains an excellent introduction to the principal early medieval sources for Germanic legend..." Ghosh advocates replacing the term "Germanic" with the term "barbarian".

Selected works

 * Kings’ Sagas and Norwegian History, 2011
 * Writing the Barbarian Past: Studies in Early Medieval Historical Narrative, Brill’s Series on the Early Middle Ages, 24 (Leiden: Brill, 2016)