Profile
I am a historian of refugees, immigration, and rights, with a focus on the Afro-Asian world and its impact on the international and global orders. I joined QMUL in 2022, following a year as a Simon Fellow at the University of Manchester. Prior to this, I was a teaching fellow at the University of Leeds. I completed a D.Phil in History at the University of Oxford in 2019, following Masters in International History at the Geneva Graduate Institute and an undergraduate degree from St. Stephen's College of the University of Delhi. In addition, I spent two years as an editorial fellow with History Workshop Online (2020-2022).
Undergraduate Teaching
Research
Research Interests:
I am interested in histories of internationalism and global order, as seen from the perspective of the decolonising world. I have focused on refugees, migration and immigration, and rights in the connected Afro-Asian world, using global and transnational approaches to these studies.
My first book was a global history of India's alternative conception of the refugee, in contrast to internationally accepted definitions, placing this within its long 20th century transition from colony to postcolonial nation-state. I am presently working on a history of the 1972 expulsion of Uganda's Asians and their subsequent resettlement across the globe, seeing this as a watershed moment in how humanitarianism came to replace the both human rights and the rights of subject-citizens of empire in the era of decolonisation.
I am Co-I on the AHRC funded 'Rethinking Internationalism: Histories and Pluralities' (2024-2026) project, which brings together a network of researchers focusing on heterogenous internationalisms and international order in new ways than the familiar stories of Anglo-American-led liberal internationalism.
Publications
Book Projects
- Making Refugees in India (Oxford University Press, released on 3rd February 2022).
- Please Go Home: Ugandan Asians and thePostcolonial International Order (MS under preparation)
Journal Articles
- “Air Travel, Statelessness, and the Rights Claims of Ugandan Asians, c.1973, ” Past and Present (forthcoming).
- “Removing the International from the Refugee,” Humanity 12, no. 1, (2021): 1-19.
- “Nehru’s Non-Alignment Dilemma: The Tibetan Refugees in India,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 42, no. 4 (2019): 675-693.
Chapters
- ‘“Re-uniting Split Families: The 1972 Ugandan Asian refugees and the Internationalisation of a Transnational Imperial diaspora,” edited volume South Asia Unbound ,Dr. Elisabeth Leake and Dr. Berenice Guyot-Rechard (eds.), University of Leiden Press/University of Chicago Press (2023).
Book Reviews
- "Book Review, Kalyani Ramnath, Boats in a Storm: Law, Migration, and Decolonization in South and Southeast Asia, 1942–1962," Journal of Asian Studies 82, no. 2 (2025).
- H-Diplo Roundtable Review of Lydia Walker, “States-in-Waiting: A Counternarrative of Global Decolonization. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
- “Book Review, Lucy Mayblin, Asylum After Empire,” Journal of Refugee Studies 32, no. 2 (2019): 342-345.
Blogs/Podcasts
- ‘Refugee Archives’, host and curator for roundtable podcast with Prof. Peter Gatrell (Manchester) , Dr. Mezna Qato(Cambridge), Paul Dudman (Living Refugee Archives, UEL) and Heather Faulkner (UNHCR archives), part of featured series, Moving People, for the History Workshop Online website, 2021.
- ‘Moving People’ introduction for the featured series, Moving People, for the History Workshop Online website, 2021
- ‘Refugees and Citizens in India: Memories of 1947 and 1971 in 2020’ for Historians Watch for the History Workshop Online website, 2020
- “Build the Refugee, Build the State” for refugeehistory.org, 2017. Updated version reposted in 2021 for Refugee Week 2021.
Supervision
- Refugees and Migration
- Rights and/or Humanitarianism
- Internationalism(s) and International Order
- Anti-colonialism and Decolonisation in South Asia and the interconnected Afro-Asian World