Hafsa Kanjwal is an assistant 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.
Currently, she is working on two book projects. The first is a general history of modern Kashmir. The second examines questions of Muslim political sovereignty and the secular, liberal international order in the context of 20th and 21st century Kashmir.
Hafsa has written and spoken on her research for a variety of news outlets including The Washington Post, Al Jazeera English, and the BBC.
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.