Read more about our speakers below
Sahana Ghosh is a social anthropologist, broadly interested in forms and experiences of inequality produced through the intersection of mobility, policing, and gender in our contemporary world. She uses ethnography and feminist approaches to study a range of concerns, such as: borders and borderlands, the mobility of people and goods, citizenship, refuge and neighborliness, the national security state, agrarian change, spatial history, transnational kinship, and the political economy of gendered labor. Sahana conducts research in India and Bangladesh.
Her first book, A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the India-Bangladesh Borderlands (University of California Press, 2023 / Yoda Press 2024), chronicles the slow transformation of a connected region into national borderlands and shows the foundational place of gender and sexuality in the meaning and management of threat and security in relation to mobility. This book recasts a singular focus on border fences and migrants as border-crossers and shows, instead, that postcolonial bordering materializes through multiple forms of violence and devaluation in agrarian, borderland lives. The book received the AAA’s Association of Political and Legal Anthropology (APLA) Book Prize in Critical Ethnography 2024, Honorable Mention.
Sahana’s academic writing and photo essays have been published in the American Anthropologist, Current Anthropology, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, the Economic and Political Weekly, Gender, Place and Culture, among others. She also contributes to podcasts, op-eds, and photo essays to engage in wider public debates on these topics.
Sahana received her PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Before joining NUS, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, Harvard University and at the Watson Institute at Brown University. She also holds an MPhil in Migration Studies from the University of Oxford and a BA and MA in English Literature from Delhi University and Jadavpur University, respectively.
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. Hafsa has written and spoken on her research for a variety of news outlets including The Washington Post, Al Jazeera English, and the BBC.
Shenila Khoja-Moolji holds the Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani Endowed Chair of Muslim Societies and is an Associate Professor at Georgetown University. She is an award-winning author whose research explores the interplay of gender, race, religion, and power in transnational contexts. She explores this theme particularly in relation to Muslim populations in South Asia and the North American diaspora.
Professor Khoja-Moolji serves as a steering committee member for the Asian North American Religion, Culture, and Society unit of the American Academy of Religion; as a board member of the Ismaili Tariqa and Religious Education, USA; and recently completed her term as an elected member of the South Asia Council on the Association for Asian Studies.
Professor Khoja-Moolji holds an undergraduate degree from Brown University, a masters from Harvard University, and a doctorate from Columbia University. She was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania.
Mubbashir Rizvi is a professorial lecturer at of Anthropology at American University. His research and teaching interests span social movements, political ecology, racial capitalism in South Asia and its diasporas. Mubbashir’s book, The Ethics of Staying: Social Movements and Land Rights in Pakistan (SUP 2019), is a history and ethnography of AMP, a land rights movement that successfully challenged the Pakistan military’s efforts to privatize state-owned lands. He is broadly interested in how poor marginalized communities strive to build a good life in the midst of economic uncertainty and repression. Mubbashir’s scholarly publications analyze the role of infrastructure projects in shaping political subjectivity in Punjab Pakistan, the use of counter-terrorism policies to suppress peasant/indigenous demand for land rights’ and the complexities arising from civil society/ NGO involvement in grassroots struggles. His current fieldwork research focus is on informal urbanism in Karachi’s food markets, and the role of these markets in structuring relations of coexistence in the aftermath of urban violence. He is also working on a DC based project that looks at the overlooked history and memory of the DC waterfront, especially the Potomac river through the framework of Racial capitalism.
Daniel Waqar is a PhD candidate in History at Tufts University focusing on the history of “unlawful assembly” across colonial and postcolonial South Asia. He previously obtained his Master’s of Philosophy in Modern South Asian Studies at the University of Oxford and his BA in History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Daniel is also a Harry S. Truman and Charles B. Rangel Scholar.
Harleen Kaur is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Sociology at Arizona State University. She studies the subjectivity formation of the US Sikh Punjabi diaspora through empire, memory, and advocacy for social and political inclusion. Her forthcoming monography, Martialing Race, traces the co-optation of Sikh embodied sovereignty and community negotiations for safety and recognition into empire- and state-driven tactics of increased surveillance, militarization, and policing.
Natasha Raheja is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. She received her PhD in Anthropology from NYU and her BS in Biology and MA in Asian Languages and Literature with a focus on Urdu from UT Austin. Her projects explore questions of migration, belonging, and majority-minority politics in South Asia. Dr. Raheja is the director of Cast in India, an observational portrait of the Bengali metal workers who manufacture New York City manhole covers, and A Gregarious Species, an experimental found-footage film featuring cross-border locust swarms in the Thar Desert region. She is also completing a book entitled A Selective Welcome: Pakistani Hindus in India.
Stanley Thangaraj, Ph.D., joined the Stonehill College community in 2022. As the inaugural James E. Hayden Chair for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Social Justice, he leads the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Social Justice, an interdisciplinary hub supporting faculty and student research that examines how race, ethnicity, and other categories of difference are infused in structures of power.
Thangaraj’s scholarship focuses on the ways in which race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class and citizenship shape the experiences of immigrant and refugee communities in the U.S. South. His 2015 book, Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity (NYU Press), investigates the ways in which South Asian American men express their identities and cultivate a sense of belonging in the United States through sports. He has also been interviewed frequently to provide insights on the experiences of the Asian American community, particularly Asian American athletes. His two newest projects examine communities of color in the U.S. South. His most recent book examines Kurdish diasporas in Nashville and the northeastern US to examine how they manage stateless, race, and identity. Thangaraj’s third book project investigates the politics of race, class and sexuality through the relationships between civil rights museums, the city and processes of gentrification.
Thangaraj comes to Stonehill from the City College of New York, where he served as an associate professor of anthropology, gender studies, and international studies. He worked with students, staff, and faculty on a Gender Task Force that played a pivotal role in the creation of the LGBTQI Center on campus. He served as chair of City College of New York’s Faculty Senate Diversity Committee, facilitating anti-racist dialogue to help recruit and retain students and faculty of color while addressing issues of accessibility, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. He was also an active member of the City University of New York Advisory Council on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Sasha Sabherwal is an interdisciplinary scholar of the South Asian diaspora with research interests in critical ethnic studies, the racialization of religion, transnational gender and sexuality studies, and the intersections of caste and race. She holds a PhD from Yale University in the Department of American Studies with a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research examines caste and gender hierarchies in the Sikh diaspora of the Pacific Northwest.
Her book manuscript, Circuits of Faith: Caste, Gender, and Racialized Religion in the Sikh Diaspora of the Transnational Pacific Northwest, is an ethnographic exploration of how caste is reproduced across the U.S. and Canada, and how it becomes a heterogeneous and flexible category. The project demonstrates that as caste travels, it is remade, oscillating between traditional caste hierarchies from the homeland and contemporary diaspora.