about

Naveeda Khan is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Her doctoral and postdoctoral project was on Islam, state and the everyday in Pakistan. She is the editor of Beyond Crisis: Re-Evaluating Pakistan (2010). She is the author of Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan (2012), which won the American Institute of Pakistan Studies Book Prize (2013). Her research and writing on Pakistan was funded by the National Science Foundation, Fulbright Hayes, Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, American Institute of Pakistan Studies, Columbia University Lindt Fellowship, United States Institute of Peace and the American Philosophical Society. Her work on this topic has been published in Social Text, Cultural Anthropology, Comparative Studies in Society and History among other journals and books.

Khan is completing a second project on river life and climate change in Bangladesh across the scales of the self/unconscious, the domestic, the national and the global. River Life and the Upspring of Nature based on the research has been published by Duke University Press. In Quest of a Shared Planet: Negotiating Climate from the Global South has been published by Fordham University Press and is open access. She is planning a third manuscript tentatively titled Householding on a Warming Earth and a short book of essays titled Schelling and the Romantic Method. The research for this project was funded by the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies, the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the American Philosophical Society. Funding for new training in support of this work, specifically, introduction to climate science and policy, hydrology, geo-fluvial morphology, ecology, GIS and network analysis and German nature philosophy was provided by the Andrew Mellon New Directions Fellowship and the Johns Hopkins University Catalyst Grant. Her work has been published in Ethnos, Environment and Planning D, Anthropologica, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Theory and Event, Hau, The Yale Yearbook in Comparative Literature, Ethnos, MLN among other journals and books.

Khan has attempted to bridge the gap in scholarship between Pakistan and Bangladesh through a review article, "Of What Does Self-Knowing Consist? Perspectives from Bangladesh and Pakistan" in the Annual Review of Anthropology. Khan also has an enduring interest in how the technical, the rational and the material capture the imagination and are suffused with aesthetic, theological and utopian sensibilities. She approaches these issues from the vantage of her ongoing projects (see above) and readings into German idealism and romanticism (see "Kant and Anthropology"). With Drs. Veena Das and Jeremy Greene, Khan was the co-organizer of a Andrew Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar on "Precision and Uncertainty in a World of Data" (2019-2022). Khan is also an amateur photographer.