Research & Innovation

Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid is no stranger to the elite pools from which US investment banks and management consulting firms draw their entry-level analysts. After studying creative writing at Princeton under Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates, Hamid earned a law degree at Harvard and joined McKinsey & Company, the leading consulting firm. Although Hamid "had his pick of investment-banking job offers when he graduated in 1996. He picked McKinsey instead, attracted by the more creative atmosphere" (Thomas, Jr.). While working at the firm, Hamid published his well-received debut novel Moth Smoke (2000), which centers on a mid-level banker in Lahore caught in a downward spiral. However, it was Hamid's second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) that catapulted him into global fame. An international commercial and critical success, the novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and adapted, somewhat unfaithfully, into a feature film. The novel is narrated by Changez, a Princeton-educated Pakistani valuation analyst who abandons his career in the US, returns to Lahore as a university lecturer in finance, and becomes an anti-imperialist activist. The novel's frame narration depicts a conversation between Changez and an unnamed American stranger at a café in the Anarkali Bazaar in Lahore. However, the novel only presents Changez's perspective and does not directly represent the responses of the American, whom he intimates may be a CIA assassin. Changez narrates in a direct address and has sole narrative control.

Forthcoming with the University of Alabama Press, 2022.

It details how major writers on horsemanship and its military application came to advocate for formal “school” dressage together with outdoor hunt riding as the ideal preparation for cavalry horses and riders. Tracking that history through scores of works ranging from Federico Grisone’s Rules of Riding (1550) to E.G. French’s Good-Bye to Boot and Saddle (1951), Riding to Arms offers both a history of horsemen, horse soldiers, and warhorses and a study of the seminal books that shaped that history.

Related but unknown to each other, these women are exiles, immigrants, artists, outsiders, all in search of a sense of self and belonging. The owner of a professional mourning service investigates the disappearance of her employees. On the eve of the Cuban revolution, a young woman breaks into the mansion where she was once a servant to help the rebels and free herself. A musician in a traveling troupe recounts the last day she saw her father.

Linked by theme and complex familial bonds, these stories shift across genres and forms to excavate the violence wreaked on women’s bodies and document the attempt to create something meaningful in the face of loss. They ask: who do we belong to? What, if anything, belongs to us?

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Read "Seven" here.

Read the essay here.

Featured in The International Journal of Health Planning and Management, the paper presents a descriptive reflective commentary on migrant health considerations for children.

Read "Locked out of healthcare: A descriptive context of migrant health considerations in pediatrics."

Bad Humour: Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England is forthcoming from University of Pennsylvania Press (April 2022). The book uncovers how belief itself — the excess, defect, or lack of religion — was largely apprehended and understood in terms of temperament in the early modern period. Race in this period is a concept at the crossroads of a set of overlapping concerns of lineage, religion, and nation. Bad Humor is about how these concerns converge around a pseudoscientific system that confirmed the absolute difference between Protestants and Catholics, guaranteed the noble quality of English blood, and justified English colonial domination.

Read more about Bad Humor
Race and Religious Essentialism in Early Modern England.

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 134-149.

“Freedom, Now!” This rallying cry became the most iconic phrase of the Civil Rights Movement, challenging the persistent command that Black people wait―in the holds of slave ships and on auction blocks, in segregated bus stops and schoolyards―for their long-deferred liberation.

In Black Patience, Julius B. Fleming Jr. argues that, during the Civil Rights Movement, Black artists and activists used theater to energize this radical refusal to wait. Participating in a vibrant culture of embodied political performance that ranged from marches and sit-ins to jail-ins and speeches, these artists turned to theater to unsettle a violent racial project that Fleming refers to as “Black patience.” Inviting the likes of James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Douglas Turner Ward, Duke Ellington, and Oscar Brown Jr. to the stage, Black Patience illuminates how Black artists and activists of the Civil Rights era used theater to expose, critique, and repurpose structures of white supremacy. In this bold rethinking of the Civil Rights Movement, Fleming contends that Black theatrical performance was a vital technology of civil rights activism, and a crucial site of Black artistic and cultural production.