Ms. Meher Ali is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University. At Princeton, she has been an organizer for the South Asia Graduate Workshop and the South Asia Digital Humanities Working Group, as well as a co-founder of the South Asia Translation Workshop. She was previously a Fulbright student researcher in Kolkata, India, and her work has also been supported by the AIIS language fellowship, the CLS program, and the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies. She received her MA from the University of Chicago and her BA in history with honors from Brown University.
Ms. Ali’s dissertation project traces the history of the public university and higher education in modern South Asia. By taking a capacious definition of the university — as, for example, a product of state policy, an icon of modernity, a material campus, and a site for politicization — her research engages multiple historiographical fields and methods including the history of global development, urban history, architectural history, oral and social history, and ethnographies of the state.