Dr. Sadaf Ahmad

Biography

Sadaf Ahmad completed her Ph.D in Cultural Anthropology from Syracuse University in the United States in 2006, and has Masters degrees in Gender, Anthropology and Development from Goldsmiths College, the University of London (2001), and in Psychology, from the National Institute of Psychology, Quaid-e-Azam University (2000). Gender has been a cross cutting theme in her research to date and it has intersected with a variety of domains: religious revivalism, indigenous women’s social movements, gender based violence, and Pakistani cinema. Her current ethnographic research project is on Pakistani policewomen.   Her book, Transforming Faith (Syracuse University Press, 2009), is based on her doctoral research and explores how its techniques of expansion and pedagogies of persuasion have allowed Al-Huda, an Islamic school for women established in Islamabad in the early 1990s, to turn into a social movement.  Her edited book Pakistani Women: Multiple Locations and Competing Narratives was published by the Oxford University Press in 2010.  Sadaf spent a year teaching at the Hobart and William Smith Colleges in upstate New York in 2005-06, and taught courses on Gender and Islam, Women and Fundamentalism, and Introduction to Islam there. She has been teaching at LUMS since 2006 and her courses here include Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology of Christianity and Islam, Gender and Power, Food and Culture, and Qualitative Research Methods.

Research Interest

Gender has been a cross cutting theme in her research to date and it has intersected with a variety of domains: religious revivalism, indigenous women’s social movements, gender based violence, and Pakistani cinema. Her current ethnographic research project is on Pakistani policewomen.