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.