Hafsa Kanjwal is an associate professor of South Asian History in the Department of History at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on the history of the modern world, South Asian history, and Islam in the Modern World.
As a historian of modern Kashmir, she is the author of Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation (Stanford University Press, 2023), which examines how the Indian and Kashmir governments utilized state-building to entrench India’s colonial occupation of Kashmir in the aftermath of Partition. The Indian edition of the book was titled A Fate Written on Matchboxes: State-Building in Kashmir Under India (Navayana Press, 2023).
Colonizing Kashmir/A Fate Written on Matchboxes historicizes India’s occupation of Kashmir through processes of emotional integration, development, normalization, and empowerment to highlight the new hierarchies of power and domination that emerged in the aftermath of decolonization. The book won the 2025 Bernard Cohn Book Prize for best first book on South Asia.
Currently, she is working on two book projects. The first is a general history of modern Kashmir. The second foregrounds Islam as a conceptual resource for rethinking indigeneity, by examining belonging, caste, and cartography in Kashmir.
She received her Ph.D. in History and Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan and a Bachelors in Regional Studies of the Muslim World from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.