Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia

Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar works on decolonization, displacement, war, non-violence, anticolonial practice, contemporary art and the visual archive. She is the author of The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (Columbia University Press, 2007) and is presently working with nineteenth and twentieth century images from the Indo-Afghan borderlands.  

When she directed the South Asian Studies Program from 2012-2016, she co-organized the Brown-Harvard Pakistani Film Festivals of 2014 and 2015, which became Love, War and Other Longings: Essays on Cinema in Pakistan (Oxford University Press, 2020). During this time she also ran an interdisciplinary reading group entitled Theory from the South which then continued from 2018 to 2020 as Art History from the South, and resulted in the Cogut symposium and co-edited book How Secular is Art? On the Politics of Art, History and Religion in South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2023), and a RISD collaboration Art History, Postcolonialism and the Global Turn (Art Margins special issue, July 2023). She also collaborates with the Decolonial Initiative on Migration of Objects and People.