My scholarship is invested in global exhibition and museum histories, legacies of Cold War internationalism, and modern art’s relationship to institutions, especially of the state. My specific area of focus is modern and contemporary art from Pakistan and its diasporas.

My in-progress first book, Modernist Agencies: Art and Cold War Politics in Pakistan, shows how artists in Pakistan and by extension pre-1971 Bangladesh navigated the shifting, overlapping, and often contradictory concepts of the “nation” and the “state” during the late-colonial and postcolonial decades. The book offers a deeply archival study of modernist art in Pakistan and pre-1971 Bangladesh that uses exhibition and institutional case studies to provide a synthetic view of modernism in this context. It shows how artists moved knowingly and strategically through forces of institutional and state co-option in the postcolonial decades. Here, the book develops on a conference that I co-organized at the Graduate Center and the Museum of Modern Art in New York on “Art, Institutions, and Internationalism” with Chelsea Haines in 2017 along with the special issue of ARTMargins, which we edited on the same theme in 2019.

Research for the book has been supported during the dissertation stage by the Asian Cultural Council, Modernist Studies Association, Doctoral Student’s Research Council, Graduate Center, CUNY, American Institute of Pakistan Studies, Paul Mellon Centre for the Study of British Art, and a Humanities Fellowship at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Writing and research is further supported by a Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art, (2022-23).

My second book, provisionally titled Iqbal Geoffrey: UN-Art to Aesth-ethics, follows the career of Pakistani artist-lawyer Iqbal Geoffrey in the United States between 1962 and 1985, where he practiced as an abstract painter, worked at the United Nations as a Human Rights Officer (1966-1967), as an Assistant Attorney General in Illinois, and a painting professor at Central Washington University and Cleveland State University, among other institutions. The book remobilizes Geoffrey’s own theory of praxis, called aesthethics to consider his relationship to the canonical avant-garde, his universalist philosophy of modernism, and belief and confrontations with institutions of modern liberal democracy and colonial modernity.

Articles and Chapters:

• “Iqbal Geoffrey v. The Museum of Modern Art,” Art History, Volume 45, Issue 4, September 2022.

• “Introduction: Art, Institutions, and Internationalism: 1945-1973,” ARTMargins, (special issue), co-editor with Chelsea Haines: Volume 8. Issue 2, June 2019.

• “The Letter is Enough, After All: Muzzumil Ruheel,” TARQ Gallery, Mumbai, (2018).

• “Indian Art from Pakistan: Partition and the Royal Academy’s Indian Art Exhibition, 1947,” Representing Partition: India and Pakistan, Wolfson College Cambridge, October 2017.

• “Factual Fictions,” Hubs & Fictions: A Touring Forum on Current Art and Remoteness, ed. Sophia Hao and Edgar Schmitz, (Sternberg Press: Berlin, 2016).

Selected Reviews:

• Review: “Abstract States: Zeina Maasri, Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut’s Global Sixties (2020), Anneka Lenssen, Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (2020), Sarah-Neel Smith, Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey (2022),” ARTMargins, Volume 13, Issue 1, January 2024.

• “‘Anwar Jalal Shemza’ and ‘The Eye Still Seeks’,” (book review), ArtAsiaPacific, January 2016.