I am a PhD Candidate in social anthropology at Harvard, studying how the encounter between kinship and law is staged in the family courts in Peshawar, Pakistan through wife-initiated divorce. In the courts, what interests me are questions of shame—how is shame experienced, negotiated, and weaponized?—and time, i.e. whose side is time on? Who waits, who wields waiting, and how is waiting narrativized?
My PhD research is a continuation of my MPhil thesis, “Law and Love in the Family Courts in Peshawar”, which I completed in 2018 at the University of Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar. Before my disciplinary switch to anthropology, I had completed an undergraduate degree in law at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). In my current research I develop a continuing interest in the history and ethnography of Muslim Personal Law in Pakistan.
My CV is available here
Awards and Honours
Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant (2024)
The Wenner-Gren Foundation funds fieldwork for doctoral projects that aim to advance anthropological knowledge and further our understanding of what it means to be human. My project, "The Law is like a Camel's Intestines": Enduring Divorce in Peshawar's family courts", focuses on how practices of waiting, making other wait, and narratives of waiting shape interactions in the Peshawar family courts. I study how Pashtun women litigating divorce constitute themselves, and are constituted as, gendered citizens through their relationship with time. A focus on time highlights the nature of the encounter between multiple temporal orders and litigants’ strategic manipulations of time’s speed and tempo, within the legal process.
Teaching
Teaching Fellow, Harvard University
WOMGEN 98S: Junior Tutorial (2023)
WOMGEN 1209: Dangerous Words (2022)
ANTHRO 1827: Social Medicine (2022)
Adjunct Faculty, Lahore University of Management Sciences
LAW 360: Muslim Personal Law (2020)