Dr. Shabana Bano is Associate Professor of Psychology at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, where she also received her Ph.D. She is the recipient of a National Scholarship awarded by the Government of India, a Shastri-Indo Canadian Faculty Mobility Fellowship, and a Witkin-Okonji Award. Her research investigates social identity, acculturation, mutual attitudes, psycho-social adaptation and intercultural relations among Indian Hindus and Muslims, with a special focus on how traditional Sanskrit and Quranic schools influence the psychosocial development of children and adolescents. Her work includes cross-cultural projects based in Canada, Switzerland and the USA, and she served as Visiting Fellow at the University of Guelph, Canada and Visiting Scholar at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. She is widely published nationally and internationally. Most recently, she co-edited the volume Understanding Psychology in the Context of Relationship, Community, Workplace and Culture (Springer, 2021).
Dr. Bano’s Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence project investigates the possibility that school attainment has consequences for the socialization of Muslim women’s identity and their psychosocial adaptation. Her project does a comparative study of religious Muslim schools and secular schools in the United States and in India. This project will help promote the development of gender equality attitudes and positive gender identity among young women through school attainment, whether religious or secular.