City of Lyrics: Ordinary Poets and Islamicate Popular Culture in Early Modern Delhi (The University of North Carolina Press)

“Nathan Tabor’s impressive study of the emerging culture of poetic gatherings (mushāʿirahs) in eighteenth- century Delhi demonstrates how sprawling networks of “ordinary poets” shaped Urdu as a rising literary language. By setting his examination of minor poets from many different regions, Nathan demonstrates how the urban history of one city can still speak to the wider trans-regional, multilingual, entangled histories of Urdu and Persian literary cultures. He offers compelling evidence for the ways in which poetic exchanges helped to anchor friendships and also fueled rivalries, spurring poets to constantly innovate and create new poetic forms. Drawing from a vast, multi-lingual cannon, poets reframed established tropes, affective registers, and literary convention to shape new aesthetic forms, meaning, and even ethical ideas. The competitive space of the mushāʿirah also shaped new forms of belonging and exclusion and both reflected and remade social hierarchies.  This is a rich compelling social history of a literary culture written in an extremely engaging and accessible manner. Tabor’s makes a persuasive case for how Urdu emerges as a global language, by drawing attention to the rich agency of non-elite participants in mushāʿirah culture both in the eighteenth century, and in our own time.”

Citizens to Traitors: Bengali Internment in Pakistan, 1971-1974 (Cambridge University Press)

“In a path-breaking contribution, Ilyas Chattha recovers the silenced history of elite and ordinary residents of Pakistan who were transformed by the 1971 Bangladesh war from rights-bearing citizens to ethnically marked ‘others’, now suspected traitors, able to be stripped of political and human rights and subjected to indefinite internment. Drawing upon period journalism, neglected official and personal correspondence and records, oral histories, and visits to former internment facilities Chattha reconstructs and contextualizes the suppressed narratives of Bengali officials, students, and workers living in West Pakistan who often lost everything during the 1971-74 Bangladesh war and post-war years. Their often complex transregional identities, livelihoods, and prospects were transformed by new nationalist ‘imagined community’ dynamics that too easily denaturalized, held hostage, and finally erased inconvenient individuals and communities.”

Are you an AIPS member who is presenting at an upcoming conference? Check out AIPS’s Travel Grants! The next deadline to apply is June 15. AIPS Travel Grants fund travel to scholarly conferences for the presentation of papers or organization of panels on topics relevant to Pakistan Studies.

*Please review the “Travel Grants” tab in “Opportunities” for more information on eligibility.*

AIPS Pakistan collaborated with the Pakistan Academy of Letters, Islamabad to host an event titled “Pakistan’s Heritage and Cultural Conservation: Challenges, Strategies, and the Way Forward” on May 4, 2026. The event significantly enriched Pakistan Studies by expanding its focus beyond political narratives to include culture as a core analytical lens, while fostering interdisciplinary dialogue with fields such as Literature, Anthropology, History, Cultural Studies, and Fine Arts. It generated new research agendas by identifying gaps in areas like intangible heritage, and political threats to historical sites, while also amplifying regional and marginalized voices to make the field more inclusive and representative. At the same time, the event bridged academia and policy by engaging stakeholders involved in conservation, legislation, and tourism, strengthened Pakistan Studies’ global relevance by connecting it with international heritage debates, and enhanced public engagement by producing knowledge that informs curricula, public discourse, and a more culturally grounded understanding of national identity.

Presenters and graduate students showcased locally developed apps and projects that addressed and came up with solutions for multiple matters in the fields of education at different levels. By strengthening digital and media literacy and ethical AI awareness within social sciences, this event positioned Pakistan Studies within the broader global discourse on technology.

Photo of Badshahi Mosque Complex by Robert Nichols

AIPS was busy this past year. As noted in the Newsletter, we signed 13 MOUs with universities across Pakistan. We also welcomed Dr. Aalia Sohail Khan as the new Director of the AIPS Islamabad Office and hosted our fourth Introduction to Urdu Language & Culture online course. 

Members and Trustees conducted research across the world; facilitated workshops and conferences in Pakistan; and published many books and journal articles. 

Congratulations to all for a successful 2025, and please continue sending us your highlights as we compile next year’s newsletter!

Memorializing the Nation-State: Minar-e-Pakistan between Memory and History
Hashim Ali

Border Bureaucracy and Discourses: Demarcation and Surveillance of the Punjab Border in the Wake of 1947 Partition
Ilyas Chattha

Seventy-five Years of Partition: Rupture and Connectivity: India-Pakistan Cricketing Relations
Ali Khan

Nation and Region in the Post-Partition Remaking of the Indus River Basin
David Gilmartin

The Lahore-Amritsar Borderland and Indo-Pakistan Relations during the Early Postcolonial Period
Ian Talbot

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor: the Politics of Development
Yunas Samad

Partition, Passport and the Documentary Life of Belonging
Haimanti Roy

Review of Christopher Candland, The Islamic Welfare State: Muslim Charity, Human Security, and Government Legitimacy in Pakistan
Salwa Tareen

Review of Sanaa Alimia, Refugee Cities: How Afghans Changed Urban Pakistan
Zehra Hashmi

Review of Esha Niyogi De, Women’s Transborder Cinema: Authorship, Stardom, and Filmic Labor in South Asia
Shahnaz Rouse

As noted by the AIPS Book Prize Committee, this book “explores the life of Afghan refugees in Pakistan with a specific focus upon their contributions to the development of Karachi and Peshawar. The work, both a history and eight-year ethnographic study, outlines how waves of Afghan refugee fled to Pakistan to escape violence. As they settled into the peripheries of urban centers, they created their own communities and with their labor contributed greatly to the overall development of Pakistan’s cities. The extent of their contributions and the precarity of their existence within Pakistan is explored in detail.”

They went on to remark that “Alimia’s scholarship is excellent. The book is well-written and easy to read. It draws upon hundreds of interviews and extensive archival research.”

*This award is funded by AIPS unrestricted funds and is not supported by United States federal grant funds.

Honorable Mentions (equally ranked)

Ijlal Naqvi, Access to Power: Electricity and the Infrastructural State in Pakistan (Oxford University Press, 2022)

Omer Aijazi, Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

Nadia Agha, Kinship, Patriarchal Structure and Women’s Bargaining with Patriarchy in Rural Sindh, Pakistan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)