Khan, Umrat

Umrat Khan is a historian of South Asia whose research examines debates around calligraphy in Panjab between the 18th and 20th centuries. Drawing on calligraphic manuals, tazkiras, and mystical and scientific treatises, she investigates how calligraphy came to be posited as a science, and what this claim reveals about the intersecting pressures of colonial rule, emerging nation-states, and print capitalism on epistemic traditions in the region.

Umrat received her MA from New York University, where she studied 19th century fingernail calligraphic manuscripts from Qajar Iran and explored how these inscriptions functioned as traces of the calligrapher’s piety. She also holds a BSc (Honors) in Social Development and Policy from Habib University in Karachi, where her undergraduate thesis was an ethnographic study of a master-calligrapher’s conceptualization of calligraphy as ʿilm (science).