Neelam Khoja

Neelam Khoja is a doctoral candidate in Histories and Cultures of Muslim Societies in the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department at Harvard. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “The Power of Politics in 18th century Punjab: Space, Culture, and Identity,” inquires how changes in political power led to new or reimagined representations of land and space, language and culture, self and community in eighteenth-century Punjab. More specifically, she investigates the implications of Iranian Nadir Shah Afshar and Afghan Ahmad Shah Abdali’s intermittent rule of Iran and the western frontier of Hindustan from roughly 1738 to the 1772. She analyzes emerging narratives in competing, overlapping, and complementary discourses about power, space, religion, ethnicity, and gender in Persian, Punjabi, Urdu, and English histories, memoirs, travel writing, administrative records, and literature. She argues that Nadir Shah Afshar and Ahmad Shah Abdali’s political, spatial, and cultural sovereignty disrupt accepted views on political legitimacy, identity politics, and spatial conceptualization. For archival research in South Asia and Europe, Neelam received support from the Fulbright Program; American Institute of Pakistan Studies; American Institute of Iranian Studies; and the South Asia Institute and Asia Center at Harvard.