Masood, Kamini

Kamini Masood is a PhD Student in South Asian history at Columbia. Her interests lie at the intersection of environmental, intellectual and cultural histories of eighteenth-century South Asia. Her research currently focuses on the relationship between the natural environment, ideas of space and place, and empire in the long eighteenth century in Punjab.

Masood's research explores how the natural environment impacts and illuminates the political and social ‘crises’ of the long eighteenth century (1707-1849) in the Panjab under the late Mughal and Sikh empires. It traces the contours of the labile relationship between the natural world, the polity, and the ‘space’ of empire. Reframing this tumultuous moment as a question of environmental history, the project interrogates the ways in which natural disaster informs, shapes and constrains the actions of a variety of historical actors, and highlights how space is imagined, organized and narrativized by various political entities in pre-colonial Panjab.

She has also served as rapporteur for the South Asia Seminar, and the Culture, Power and Boundaries Seminar at Columbia University.

Education

Kamini received her B.A. in History from Lafayette College.