Advisor: Dr. Sarah Waheed

Bio:

Maleeha Fatima is a first year PhD in History student with a focus on South Asian History, Muslim History and Public History. Broadly, her research interest focuses on issues of memory and the institutional preservation of oral histories in Muslim communities, especially those of women in the Deccan region — but also other global contexts. With her research, she intends to explore and develop new theoretical frameworks for writing the histories of a socio-political minority through decolonial approaches and disseminate historical writings through creative Public History products. 

She is associated with the Deccan Archive, a public history platform, as a collaborative researcher.  She is also an Associate Researcher for a project on the Henry Luce Foundation grant to study Indian Muslims today, collaboratively being conducted by Princeton University, Sciences Po University and Columbia University. She has been invited to present her work at conferences and workshops hosted by different Universities including Princeton University (2023), King's College London (2022) and Sciences Po University (2021). She also worked as an archival librarian in one of India’s best preserved Heritage Hotels: — Taj Falaknuma Palace in Hyderabad. She researched the palace’s history and worked as its history guide.

Prior to the PhD, she completed an MA with honors in Political Science from Ashoka University, India in 2021. She has worked as a Research Fellow at the Trivedi Centre for Political Data (TCPD), leading and coordinating various data driven projects to study India’s political landscape. She has published a chapter titled "Collective Trauma, Belonging and Citizenship of Muslims in Hyderabad" for the edited volume New Challenges for Indian Muslims: Beyond Citizenship Concerns (2023). Her MA thesis, titled “The Politics of Waqf – An Exploration of the Interaction of Auqaf with Sectarianism in Hyderabad.”, studies the histories of the socioeconomic and political landscape that governed the state of Hyderabad in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; and  highlights how the institution of Waqf acts as a catalyst for the politicization of the Shi’a-Sunni sectarian cleavages.