Research and Teaching Interests

I am primarily a labor historian with a geographical focus on South Asia. My teaching and research interests focus on labor movements with particular attention to the space of the city and the way in which it affects worker organization and possibilities. This idea, of possibilities, underlies most of my work and was the main focus of my PhD dissertation that explored how expansive political imaginations, made possible by the end of WWII and decolonization, made workers in Pakistan think that a revolution was possible. I spent some time as a research fellow at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam working on a comparative project exploring how Partition in 1947 impacted the labor networks of Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Indian sea faring workers. I moved back to Pakistan in 2014 and joined LUMS (Lahore University of Management Services) as an Assistant Professor where I have been teaching courses on global histories of migration, nationalism in South Asia, labour and urban history and Pakistani history.

Current Projects

Partition of Identity: An exploration of Belonging in Bengalis in Pakistan, 1971- 2021. This Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC, UK) funded project is being led by Dr. Humera Iqbal (UCL) and Dr. Anushay Malik (LUMS). The project will run from 2020 to 2022 and focuses on the community of Bengali ‘migrants’ in Karachi, Pakistan.

Publications

• (Under review) 'The Urban Poor and their Religion: Class and Christianity in the City of Lahore,' scheduled to appear as part of a special issue in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.
• (Forthcoming in April 2020) ‘Leftist Parties in Pakistan: Challenges and Limitations’, Pakistan’s Political Parties: Against All Odds, Georgetown University Press.
• 'Public authority and local resistance: Abdur Rehman and the industrial workers of Lahore, 1969-1974,' Modern Asian Studies Vol. 52: 3 (2018) pp. 815-848 
• 'Alternative Politics and Dominant Narratives: Communists and the Pakistani State in the 1950s,' South Asian History and Culture, (4:4): 520-537.
• 'Pro-Poor Urban Development and the Antecedents of Poverty and Exclusion in Lahore,' Pakistan Journal of Urban Affairs, (1: 1): 3-13.