Born and raised in Bangladesh and educated in Bangladesh, India and the United States, Naveeda Khan is Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins. She received her BA in History from Vassar College, MA in Anthropology from the New School for Social Research and PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. She has worked for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Dhaka and Cox's Bazaar, Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), Travelers and Immigrants Aid (TIA) and Field Museum. She has taught at the Bengal Institute for Architecture, Landscapes and Settlements and the School of Criticism and Theory.

While Naveeda considers herself primarily an anthropologist of religion and environment, she is at present working on a book on the July Uprising in Bangladesh in 2024, with a focus on student activism against authoritarianism and the aftermath of the fall of a government. Her questions have to do with political voice, how one knows one has it, how one gains it, and how one stands to lose it.

When not researching the July Uprising, she works on river life and climate change in Bangladesh, examining how people live with moving land within the Brahmaputra/Jamuna River: what such physical dynamism does to feelings of belonging, conceptions of property, mechanics of living together and imaginations of the future. A second effort in her research on environment and Bangladesh navigated the UN sponsored negotiations over global climate policy, using it as a vantage to understand the shape of a politics labeled as Global South at this moment in time. She also looked at youth participation in the negotiations. Naveeda is currently completing a third manuscript on these topics titled "The Senses of Climate: Provisioning and Prophesying in the Jamuna Chars,” studying the forms (visual, literary, bodily, oneiric) by which climate change is mediated to those living on the Jamuna Chars and the analytics they deploy for deciphering these.

For her doctoral and postdoctoral work, Naveeda worked on religious difference and conflict within urban neighborhoods in Pakistan. Her 2012 book Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan (Duke and Orient Blackswan) attempted to recast the framework for studying Pakistan from one of lack ("insufficiently imagined") to one of plenitude by showing that it was conceived as a place of experimentation over what it is to be a modern Muslim. The book also showed how this way of posing the question made it vulnerable to becoming a question of who is a Muslim, or who counts as such for the nation-state, with violent consequences.

Naveeda has long been keen to bridge gaps among regional scholarship that too narrowly take the perspectives of nation states (see her submission to the Annual Review of Anthropology and her co-edited special issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies with literary scholar Firdous Azim). She is also interested in bringing philosophy into productive conversation with anthropology theory and ethnography (see her "Kant and Anthropology" review article). On this theme, she is writing a short book of essays titled "Schelling and the Romantic Method." Her interest in how technology sits alongside people's various strivings, for political voice, a secure life in the face of environmental devastation, and religious self-perfection led her to serve as co-organizer of a Andrew Mellon Foundation-funded Sawyer Seminar on "Precision and Uncertainty in a World of Data" (2019-2022) with her Hopkins colleagues Veena Das and Jeremy Greene.

Please see her curriculum vitae, personal website and academia page for more information.

Naveeda teaches from the deep and contemporary archives of anthropology juxtaposed with history and historiography, theological writings, environmental thought, Black Studies, literature and philosophy. The questions that motivate her teaching are those of voice, form, nature, thought, and striving. Her pedagogical method has been to see how a question/concept/experience accrue different formulations across domains, replies, or even counter questions/concepts/experiences. Some of her courses include: “Structuralism and After,” “Does History Make Us Sick?” “Anthropology of Religion,” “Concepts: Reading Hindu and Islamic Texts,” “The Death of Nature?” “An Aesthetics for the End,” “Households and Crises,” “Romantic Anthropology,” and “Schelling and Anthropology.” She also teaches courses with a focus on South Asia and Islam, such as, “Modern South Asia,” “The Political Culture of Pakistan,” “The Political Culture of Bangladesh,” and “Islam between History and Anthropology.”

Publications and Public Facing Writing

Monographs and Books

Research underway “The Year of the Revolution: Students and the 2024 July Uprising in Bangladesh”

In Prep. “The Senses of Climate: Provisioning and Prophesying in the Jamuna Chars”

In Prep. “Schelling and the Romantic Method”

Forthcoming Editor, Dream’s Navel: Reading a Bengali Modernist Classic Akhtaruzzaman Elias’s Khwabnama” co-edited with Firdous Azim, University Press Ltd., Bangladesh

2023 In Quest of a Shared Planet: Negotiating Climate from the Global South. Fordham University Press

https://research.library.fordham.edu/literary/2/

2023 River Life and the Upspring of Nature. Duke University Press.  To be published by

University Press Ltd, Bangladesh

2012 Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan. Duke University Press

2012 Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan. Orient Black Swan (South Asia release)

To be republished by Folio Books, Pakistan and in English and Bangla translation by University Press Ltd, Bangladesh

2010 Editor, Beyond Crisis: Reevaluating Pakistan. In Critical Asian Studies, Routledge, India

Special Issues of Journals (Peer Reviewed)

2024 Editor, “Dream’s Navel: Reading Akhtaruzzaman Elias’s Khwabnama” co-edited with

Firdous Azim, special issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 25(4)

2023 Editor, “Cross-Time Relations: The Ordinariness of Science Fiction in Anthropology, Film, and Literature,” co-edited with Andrew Brandel, special section of Anthropology and Humanism, 48(1)

2015 Editor, “The Fate of Our Corruption,” special issue of Contributions to Indian Sociology, 49(3)

2010 Editor, “Number as Inventive Frontier,” co-edited with Jane I. Guyer and Juan Obarrio, special issue of Anthropological Theory, 10(1-2)

 

Articles (Peer Reviewed)

Under Review “The Islamic Mythological”

2025 “Servitude and Separateness in the Time of Pandemic: Female Domestic Workers in Urban Households in Bangladesh,” co-written with Namira Shameem and Anishta Khan, Journal of Bangladesh Studies, 27(1): 59-78

2024 “Introduction,” “Dream’s Navel: Reading Akhtaruzzaman Elias’s Khwabnama” co-edited with Firdous Azim, special issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 25(4): 533-544

2024 “Exquisite Corpse: Aesthetics of the Dead in Akhtaruzzaman Elias’ Khwabnama” In special issue of Journal of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 25(4): 638-653

2023 “Iqbal before the Mosque of Cordoba: Goethean Crossings,” in “Steps to a Global Thought: Thinking from Elsewhere” eds. Bhrigupati Singh, Veena Das and Sudipta Kaviraj” special issue of Sophia 62: 533-553

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-023-00959-y

2023 “Introduction to the Special Section, ‘Cross-Time Relations: The Ordinariness of Science Fiction in Anthropology, Film, and Literature,’” co-written with Andrew Brandel, in Anthropology and Humanism 48(1): 136-145

2023 “Radical Householding towards a Post-Capitalist World in Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 and Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047” in “Cross-Time Relations: The Ordinariness of Science Fiction in Anthropology, Film, and Literature,” special section of Anthropology and Humanism 48(1): 188-202

2021 “Marginal Lives and the Microsociology of Overhearing in the Jamuna Chars,” in Ethnos 85(5): 927-948

2021 “Kant and Anthropology,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology

2016 “Living Paradox in Riverine Bangladesh: Whiteheadian Perspectives on Ganga Devi and Khwaja Khijir” in “An Amphibious Anthropology: The Production of Place at the Confluence of Land and Water,” eds. Karine Gagne and Mattias Borg Rasmussen, special issue of Anthropologica, 58(2): 179-192
*Republished in Terra Aqua: The Amphibious Lifeworlds of Coastal and Maritime South Asia ed. Sudipta Sen and May Joseph. Routledge (2023)

2015 “The fate of our corruption: An introductory note” in “The Fate of Our Corruption,” special issue of Contributions to Indian Sociology, 49(3): 287-304

2015 “River and the Corruption of Memory” in “The Fate of Our Corruption,” special issue of Contributions to Indian Sociology, 49(3): 389-409

2015 “Of What Does Self-Knowing Consist? Perspectives from Bangladesh and Pakistan” in Annual Review of Anthropology 44: 457-475

2014 “Dogs and Humans and What Earth Can Be: Filaments of Muslim Ecological Thought” in Hau 4(3): 245-264

2011 “Geddes in India: Town Planning, Plant Sentience, Cooperative Evolution” in Environment and Planning D, 29(5): 840-856

2011 “The Acoustics of Muslim Striving: Loudspeaker Use in Ritual Practice in Pakistan” in Comparative Studies on Society and History (CSSH), 53(3): 571-594

2010 “Introduction,” co-authored with Jane I. Guyer, Juan Obarrio, Caroline Bledsoe, Julie Chu, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Catherine Eagleton, Keith Hart, Paul Kockelman, Jean Lave, Caroline McLoughlin, Bill Maurer, Federico Neiburg, Diane Nelson, Charles Stafford and Helen Verran in “Number as Inventive Frontier,” special issue of Anthropological Theory, 10(1-2): 36-61

2010 “Nineteen: A Story” in “Number as Inventive Frontier,” special issue of Anthropological Theory, May: 112-122

2010 “Images that come Unbidden: Some Thoughts on the Danish Cartoon Controversy” in “Religion and Sexuality,” special issue of Borderlands, 9(3)

2006 “Of Children and Jinns: An Inquiry into an Unexpected Friendship During Uncertain Times” in Cultural Anthropology 21(6): 234-264
* Republished in a curated collection on “Everyday Islam” in Cultural Anthropology (2014)

https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/catalog/category/everyday-islam

* Republished in Islam and Society in Pakistan: Anthropological Perspectives, eds. Ali Khan and Magnus Marsden, Oxford University Press (2011)

* Republished in abridged form as “In Friendship: A Father, A Child and A Jinn” in Everyday Life in South Asia, eds. Diane Mines and Sarah Lamb, Indiana University Press (2010)

2006 “Flaws in the Flow: Roads and their Modernity in Pakistan” in Social Text, 24(4): 87-113

2005 “Networks Actual and Potential: Think Tanks, War Games and the Creation of Contemporary American Politics” co-authored with Bhrigupati Singh, Deborah Poole and Richard Baxstrom in Theory and Event, 8(4)

 

Book Chapters (Peer Reviewed)

2010 “Introduction” in Beyond Crisis: Reevaluating Pakistan, Routledge: 1-28

2010 “Mosque Construction, Or the Violence of the Ordinary” in Beyond Crisis:  Reevaluating Pakistan, Routledge: 482-518

2008 “The Martyrdom of Mosques: Imagery and Iconoclasm in Modern Pakistan” in Enchantments of Modernity, ed. Saurabh Dube, Routledge: 372-401

 

Articles and Book Chapters (Editor Reviewed)

Forthcoming A Book Forum on Andrew Brandel’s Moving Words: Literature, Memory and Migration in Berlin, American Anthropologist

2025   “One River, Many Names: Between Fluidity and Control” co-written with Bryan Tilt, Anthropology News November 13

https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/one-river-many-names-between-fluidity-and-control/

2025 A Book Forum on Naveeda Khan’s River Life and the Upspring of Nature, Hau: A Journal of Ethnographic Theory 15(3): 790-818

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/hau/2025/15/3

2025 “Make What Price They Will: Reading Jane Guyer.” Forum: Remembering Jane Guyer, Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 15(2): 542-545

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/736298

2025 A Book Forum on Scott MacLochlainn’s The Copy Generic, History and Anthropology 36(1): 186-216

https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2024.2361618

2024 “Potencies of a Transected Sovereignty: Reflections on ‘What is Critical Pakistan Studies?’ in “Critical Forum: What is Critical Pakistan Studies,” Critical Pakistan Studies 1(1), May, 4-13

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/critical-pakistan-studies/article/critical-forum-what-is-critical-pakistan-studies/66ED94886B7F38440363468BA01A5C5E

2023 “The Many Faces of the Padma River in Jago Hua Severa and Padma Nodir Majhi” in The Great Padma: The Epic River that Made the Bengal Delta, ed. Kazi Khaleed Ashraf. Oro Editions

2022 “Climate Change as a Vocation” in “Parties to the Globe: Anthropological

Perspectives on Climate Change Governance,” eds. James J. A. Blair and Cynthia Isenhour, Hot Spots Series, Cultural Anthropology

https://culanth.org/fieldsights/climate-change-as-vocation

2022 “Commentary on Land and Water Special Collection” co-written with Kunal Joshi. Geoforum, 131: 232-233

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.11.015

2022 “The Problem with Children in Politics: The Documentary Evidence of Climate Activism,” co-written with Charles Nuermberger, Anthropology in Action

https://doi.org/10.3167/aia.2022.290304

2021 “Between the Mood and the Juice: The Pleasures of Conversing with Rochelle Tobias” Modern Language Notes (MLN), German Issue, 136(3): 503-516

2019 “At Play with the Giants: Between the Patchy Anthropocene and Romantic Geology” in Current Anthropology, 60 (Supplement 20): S333-S341

2019 “What Remains? Thinking with Moffat, Kapila, Siddique, and Mookherjee” Afterward to Special Section “The Past for Pakistan” ed. Chris Moffat.  In Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 39(1): 223-225

2018 “Islam in Shadows” contribution to “New Directions on Science and Islam” in SSRC Immanent Frame

https://tif.ssrc.org/2018/10/04/islam-in-shadows/

2018 “From Rivers to Deltas: Some Conceptual and Methodological Routes” in DELTA METHODS-Reflections on Researching Hydrosocial Lifeworlds, ed. Franz Krause, Kölner Arbeitspapiere zur Ethnologie, University of Cologne, 18-21

https://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/8961/

2017 “Teaching Climate Change Otherwise” co-written with Swayam Bagaria in Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities, eds. Stephanie LeMenager, Shane Hall and Stephen Siperstein, Routledge: 170-17

2017 “On Counting” contribution to Book Forum on Nayanika Mookherjee’s Spectral Wounds: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971, ed. Andrew Brandel, in Somatosphere

https://somatosphere.com/forumpost/on-counting/

2016 Book Review of Climate Cultures eds. Jessica Barnes and Michael Dove in American Ethnologist, 43(4): 761-763

2016 “Expenditure” in “Theorizing the Contemporary,” Cultural Anthropology website, July

* Republished “Expenditure” for Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon, eds. Cymene Howe and Anand Pandian, Punctum Books (2020)

https://punctumbooks.com/titles/anthropocene-unseen-a-lexicon/

2015 Editor, Book Forum-Bhrigupati Singh’s Poverty and the Quest for Life, March,

http://somatosphere.net/2015/03/book-forum-bhrigupati-singhs-poverty-and-the-quest-for-life.html

2015 “Fragile En-souling: Reading William Connolly in Pakistan and Bangladesh” in Theory and Event, 18(3)

2014 “Insect Trails Across my Field Notes” in The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, 58: 169-173

2014 “The Death of Nature in the Era of Global Warming” in Wording the World: Veena Das and Her Interlocutors, ed. Roma Chatterji. Fordham University Press: 288-299

2014 Book Review of Faisal Devji’s The Muslim Zion in American Historical Review, 119: 1663-1664

2014 Book Review of Masooda Banu’s The Rational Believer: Choices and Decision in the Madrasas of Pakistan in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 56(2): 544-546

2013 “Action as Modernist Code: A Review of Iftikhar Dadi’s Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia in Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, 55(2)

2013 “The Question of the Political: Thinking with Matthew Hull” Book Comment on Matthew Hull’s Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan in Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3(3): 411-15.

2012 Book Review of Alyssa Ayres’ Speaking Like a State: Language and Nationalism in Pakistan in Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 22(1): 132-134

2009 “Maulana Yusuf Ludhianvi on the Limits of Legitimate Religious Difference” in Islam in South Asia in Practice ed. Barbara Metcalf, Princeton University Press: 438-446

2005 “Trespasses of the State: Ministering the Copyright to Theological Dilemmas” in Bare Acts, Sarai Reader 5, (CSDS, Delhi): 178-188

 

Public Facing Writing

Present     Editor, “An Aesthetics for the End: A Curation of Student Writings” blog collection, for American Ethnological Society (AES) website

Present       Blog collection co-written with Bareesh Chowdhury and Shrobona Shafique Dipti, Bangladesh Dossier, The University in Turmoil: Global Perspectives, b2o: Boundary 2 Online,

https://www.boundary2.org/the-university-in-turmoil-global-perspectives-dossier/

Present Consultant, “More Terms for the Universe,” Henry Luce Foundation Grant, headed by Mona Oraby, Howard University

https://newtermsfortheuniverse.org/

2024 Blog, Field Dispatches from an Uprising: The July Movement in Bangladesh

https://www.naveedakhan.org/blog/categories/field-dispatches

2024 Article, “What Really is ‘Chattra Janata’?” in “The Great Wave” special edition of The Daily Star Magazine, October

https://thegreatwave.thedailystar.net/news/what-really-is-chhatra-janata

2024 Article, “Reading Akhteruzzaman Elias after an uprising” co-written with Firdous Azim and Naeem Mohaiemen, The Daily Star, September

https://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/focus/news/reading-akhteruzzaman-elias-after-uprising-3697891

2024 Editor, “data/Big Data in the Field” blog collection, American Ethnological Society (AES) website

2023 Commentary, “Loss and Damage as a Common Climate Cause” on Project Syndicate, Nov 27

https://www.project-syndicate.org/columnist/naveeda-khan-1

*Republished by EJ Insight, Eco-Business, Taipei Times, The Times Kuwait, AsiaNews Network, QOSHE, The Independent, The Nepali Times, Entebbe News.

2023 Opinion, “How did Bangladesh and the U.S. come to be at the same negotiating table on climate change?” in The Daily Star (national daily of Bangladesh), Nov 27

https://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/focus/news/how-did-the-us-and-bangladesh-come-be-the-same-negotiating-table-climate-change-3479821

2023 Conversation, “Be more attentive to the workings of nature around us and through us” in The Daily Star (national daily of Bangladesh), July 24

https://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/focus/news/be-more-attentive-the-workings-nature-around-us-and-through-us-3376951

2023 Blog Post “It Comes Down to Activists and Accountants” Fordham University Press Blog, June,

2023 Blog Post “Legal Personhood of Rivers and the Failure of Imagination: A World Water Day Guest Post” Duke University Press Blog, March,

2023 “By the Jamuna: A Photographic Meditation,” Jamini, an Arts Journal, Bangladesh,

2020 Editor, “Covid-19 and Student Focused Concerns” blog collection co-edited with Veena Das for American Ethnological Society website,

2020 “Covid-19 and Climate Change in the Lives of Students” essay in blog collection “Covid-10 and Student Focused Concerns”

2018 “AAA goes to the Conference of the Parties” co-written with Shirley Fiske, Susan Crate, Julie Raymond and Jessica O’Reilly in Anthropology News website,

2018 American Anthropological Association (AAA) Delegate, COP Intercessional Meetings, Bonn, Germany, May.

2014 “Everyday Islam” Interview in Cultural Anthropology, http://www.culanth.org/curated_collections/19-everyday-islam

2008 “The Speech of Generals: Some Meditations on Pakistan” in SSRC Forum “Pakistan in Crisis”

https://items.ssrc.org/pakistan-in-crisis/the-speech-of-generals-some-meditations-on-pakistan-by-way-of-subaltern-studies/