Pembroke Center

Ph.D., History, Princeton University, 2026

Meher Ali is a historian of modern South Asia with interests in social and urban history, global decolonization and development, and the politics of knowledge.  

Her first book project, Planning the Postcolonial University in South Asia, examines how the university became embedded within global, technocratic regimes of developmental reasoning in (what is now) Pakistan and Bangladesh, spanning the region’s “long decolonization” from 1905-71. It argues that the university emerged in this period not primarily as a site of knowledge production or cultural reproduction, but as a distinct planning object through which anxieties about national integration, mass politics, and social order were materialized, spatialized, and administered. From admissions policies and governance structures to campus architecture, residential life, research initiatives, and language controversies, it shows how regimes of merit, intellectual hierarchy, and efficiency produced new boundaries of inclusion and exclusion around the university—an institution recast as an engine of economic and social transformation, yet entangled in modalities of social pacification and authoritarian control.  

In spring 2027, Ali will teach “Histories of Power and Protest in the University.” This course surveys the history of student protest and social movements in the American university from the early twentieth century to the present, bridging perspectives from social history and critical theory to interrogate the university's entanglements with social hierarchy, categories of difference, and political struggle. Students will be introduced to research practices in both the Brown University and Pembroke Center archives, culminating in a collective digital exhibition on the history of student activism at Brown. 

Ali’s scholarship has been published in South Asia: The Journal of South Asian Studies, History Compass, and is forthcoming in History of the Present. She is also the co-editor of the upcoming volume Horizontal Translation: An Experiment in South Asian Literature, and maintains a commitment to translation as a mode of public humanities practice.  

Ali holds a Ph.D. (2026) in History from Princeton University, and an MA from the University of Chicago (2018). She received her AB in History from Brown University in 2015.