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Dr Chris Moffat

Chris

Senior Lecturer in South Asian History

Email: c.moffat@qmul.ac.uk
Room Number: ArtsTwo 2.30

Profile

I am a political and intellectual historian of modern South Asia. My research and teaching are grounded in my interest in the ‘public life’ of history, and so questions of commemoration, conjuring, silencing and haunting are central to my work. My writing on the politics of the past draws on both archival and ethnographic methods. I joined Queen Mary in 2015, having completed my PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2014.

Research

Research Interests:

My research focuses on questions of historical methodology, especially where the discipline of history grapples with alternative conceptions of time and space, the interruptive influence of the dead, and the fraying or tangled threads of memory. I have written extensively on the Indian revolutionary martyr Bhagat Singh (1907-1931), tracing his continuing political potential into the twenty-first century and asking what it means to take such revenant figures seriously in the history of political thought.

I have a consonant interest in alternative or dissident commemorative practices, particularly as they relate to public space, public art and the politics of archival and architectural preservation.

From 2017-2020 I was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of History at QMUL, and in 2019 a Visiting Faculty Member in the Department of History, Government College University, Lahore. My research explored the contested status of ‘the past’ in Pakistan’s politics and public life. I focused on the role of the built environment in mediating relationships to history, charting conflicts over the construction, conservation and destruction of buildings in Pakistan’s major urban centres. This research will appear as a book manuscript provisionally titled 'Learning from Lahore: Architecture After Modernism in Urban Pakistan'.

Publications

Monograph

Edited Volumes

Articles and Book Chapters

 

Selected Essays and Reviews  

 

Chris has also published a number of book reviews in academic outlets, including the

American Historical Review, South Asia & LSE, Reviews in History, H-Soz-Kult, the Journal of Asian Studies and the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History.

 

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