About

I am a historian of modern South Asia working at the intersections of legal studies, social history, and critical archival studies.  

Focusing on 19th- and 20th-century South Asia, my research explores the relationship between colonialism, society, and the state, with a particular interest in how mundane activities—like paperwork—make and define state power. In my first book, Everyday Islamic Law and the Making of Modern South Asia (University of North Carolina Press, 2022), I explored these themes by analyzing the history of Islamic law and legal practice. Drawing from state and non-state records in Urdu, Persian, and English, I followed the lives and careers of Islamic legal practitioners as they engaged with the colonial state and with ordinary Muslims. I argued that these figures' routine engagements with legal questions and legal issues contributed to the making of the colonial legal system and simultaneously undermined its authority.   

My current research builds on these themes by examining how colonial and imperial law remade the social aspects of finance and capital.  Drawing from colonial archives, legal and legislative records, advertisements and public debates printed in the English- and vernacular-language press, and advice literature, treatises, and tracts published in Hindi, Gujarati, and Urdu, this research brings together the history of imperial finance with histories of informal economics and critical finance studies. The project focuses on mundane financial products like life insurance, pension schemes, provident funds, and paper currency to understand how legislation and regulation defined, quantified, and controlled risk—and determined who could take risks. The book will not only bring the history of South Asia into conversation with global histories of capitalism but also showcase the alternative and anticapitalist possibilities that regulation all but erased.  

I am currently Program Manager for the Modern Endangered Archives Program (MEAP) at the UCLA Library where I help teams around the world document and digitize at-risk cultural heritage collections for open access publication in the UCLA Digital Library. Prior to joining UCLA, I managed the South Asia Open Archives (SAOA) initiative at the Center for Research Libraries. I have held teaching and research positions at the University of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Dartmouth College, where I also ran the "Conversations on South Asia" series from 2020–2023.  

I hold a B.A. from Northwestern University, an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. My research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the U.S. Fulbright Program, and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, among other organizations.