I am a Karachi-born thinker and writer based in Berlin. Trained in cultural studies and social anthropology, my work pursues critical notions of love, intimacy, and post-migrant be/longing – a research practice best situated across the ethnographic study of Islamicate lifeworlds and fields of queer and affect theory. I am the author of Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy and Saintly Affects in Pakistan (Duke UP 2022, winner of the 2023 Ruth Benedict Prize and 2024 Bloomsbury Pakistan Prize) and the editor of Pakistan Desires: Queer Futures Elsewhere (Duke UP 2023). My current book-project turns to the self as a public archive to think philosophically and anthropologically about migrant love, queer desire and political heartbreak in Berlin
Having received my doctorate at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2016, I have since held positions as a Post-Doctoral Associate in the CRC 1171 Affective Societies as well as a multi-semester Vertretungsprofessur at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin. I have also served as guest professor at the School of Visual Arts – Städelschule in Frankfurt (M). I teach regularly on religion, migration, love and autotheory.
photo by Benjamin Farrand