Vazira Zamindar joined Brown’s History Department in 2006, and works at the intersection of anthropology and history with an interest in cross-border histories for rethinking a divided South Asia, as well as the politics of violence and its impact on history-writing itself. Her book, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories, was published by Columbia University Press in 2007, and Indian and Pakistani editions of the book came out in 2008. She is presently working on a second book on the history of archaeology and war on the northwest frontier of British India, on the borderlands with Afghanistan, and has received the International Institute of Asian Studies Fellowship, the Fulbright, and the National Endowment for Humanities Fellowship, amongst others, for this project. She has also started working on a parallel project following a single death that occurred during her fieldwork in Pakistan.
With a commitment to public engagement, in addition to giving academic talks, she has been involved in the organization of large public teach-ins on campus, on the floods in Pakistan in 2010, and on the Occupy movement in 2011. She has also worked withPrimary Source and the Choices program, FirstWorks Providence, the RISD Museum, as well as more recently with the Lahore Museum. On campus, she remains active in organizing and supporting an array of South Asia related events, including the South Asia Documentary Film Festival in 2011 and the Questioning Marginality conference in 2013.
Zamindar was supported by CCSA for a forthcoming project titled: On Walking with Gandhi.