I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Justice Studies at Hamline University and a cultural sociologist of empire and race. Using ethnographic and historical methods, I examine how imperial and postcolonial orders combine material power and cultural meaning to produce racial hierarchies, organize political belonging, and shape possibilities for collective action. My research in Afghanistan and Pakistan traces how British and U.S. empires have produced racialized judgments of political capacity and narrowed viable alternatives, while also asking how people create attachments, communities, and meaningful lives.

Currently, I am working on my book project Legible Empire: Foreclosure and Life-Making in Occupied Kabul, which asks how empire endures when occupied people recognize it clearly. Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kabul’s reading groups and literary world, ninety-three interviews and oral histories, and private-security documents, I show that highly educated, middle-class Afghans understood the U.S. presence as imperial yet saw few viable alternatives to it. I argue that the occupation foreclosed political possibility in two related ways: its racialized infrastructures—including walls, checkpoints, surveillance, and foreign dependency—communicated Afghan incapacity for self-rule, while decades of intervention helped destroy leftist anticolonial alternatives, leaving the U.S.-backed order and the Taliban as the only available political choices. Yet political foreclosure did not exhaust social life. Kabulis used resources made available by the occupation to build literary communities, relationships, and forms of joy that exceeded both submission and resistance. The book thus intervenes in scholarship on contemporary U.S. empire—particularly work emphasizing its hidden or disavowed character—by showing how imperial domination can endure even when occupied people recognize it clearly.

My peer-reviewed work has been published in British Journal of Sociology and Ethnic and Racial Studies. My work has been supported by awards including the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius Trajectories of Change Scholarship, Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs through multiple research fellowships, and the Center for the Study of South Asia at Brown University. I have also received recognition from the American Sociological Association, winning the Best Graduate Student Paper Award from the Global and Transnational Sociology Section (2024) and an Honorable Mention from the Society for the Study of Social Problems in the Global Division Best Student Paper Competition.

Before joining Hamline University, I was a Junior Fellow at the Global Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University. I hold a Ph.D. in Sociology from Brown University (2024), an M.P.A. from Harvard Kennedy School of Government (2008), and M.B.A. and B.B.A. degrees from the Institute of Business Administration, Pakistan.