SAI Aman Fellow, 2014-2015
Atiya Khan is a historian of Modern South Asia. Her first project recovers the untold story of progressive politics in Pakistan from the consolidation of the efforts to carve a Muslim majority state out of British India in 1940 until the fracture of that state with the Bangladesh War in 1971. She argues that the vicissitudes of the socialist left, its defeats at key historical moments altered the vector and the conditions of possibility for democracy in Pakistan. She is also working on a monograph that focuses on the historiography of South Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include decolonization in South Asia, difficulties of democracy and development in postcolonial South Asia and the Muslim World, and history of the international New Left social movements.