Hafsa Kanjwal

Associate Professor

302 Ramer History House

Degrees

Ph. D. in History and Women's Studies, University of Michigan
B. S. in Regional Studies of the Muslim World, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University

Selected Publications:

“Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation (Stanford University Press, 2023) https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=35575

“Kashmiri Diaspora Mobilizations: Towards Transnational Solidarity in an Age of Settler- Colonialism” in Mona Bhan et al, eds. Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies. New York: Routledge, 2022.

“Contesting Settler Colonial Logics in Kashmir as Pedagogical Praxis,” Curriculum Inquiry, Vol.52, Number 3, 2022, 373-384 (co-written with Mohamad Junaid)

“Geographies of Occupation in South Asia,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 45, Numbers 2/3, 2019 (co-written with Critical Kashmir Studies).

“The New Woman: State Led Feminism in Naya Kashmir.” in special issue “Review of Women’s Studies on Kashmir” Economic and Political Weekly Vol.53, Issue No.47, 01 Dec, 2018.

“Protest Photography in Kashmir: Between Resistance and Resilience.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 3-4: Fall/Winter 2018.

“Reflections on the Post-Partition Period: Life Narratives of Kashmiri Muslims in Contemporary Kashmir.” HIMALAYA: The Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, Vol. 38, No. 2.

“The Perils of American Muslim Politics.” In With Stones in Our Hands: Writings on Muslims, Racism, and Empire, edited by Junaid Rana and Sohail Daulatzai. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

“Kashmiri Youth: Redefining the Movement for Self-Determination.” In Political Violence in South Asia, edited by Ali Riaz, Fahmida Zaman and Zobaida Nasreen. New York, Routledge, 2019.

Teaching Interests: South Asian History, Islam and the Modern World, History of the Modern World

Research Interests: Kashmir, colonialism, state-formation, decolonization, Islam, diaspora

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. Colonizing Kashmir 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. It received the 2025 Bernard S. Cohn Prize for First Book in South Asia by the Association for Asian Studies. Her second book project 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.