I am Assistant Professor of Environment and Peace Studies at the Keough School of Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame. My research develops a conversation between the anthropology of environment, bureaucracy and law, and is animated by postcolonial critique.

My first book, The Work of Water: Infrastructure, Bureaucratic Labor and the Postcolonial Promise in Pakistan, will be published in January 2027 by Stanford University Press. It is based on more than a decade of ethnographic and archival research, and began as my doctoral dissertation, which won the 2019 S.S. Pirzada Best Dissertation in Pakistan Studies Award. A dissertation chapter, “The Gender of Corruption: Bureaucrats, Bodies and the Female Complaint,” received the 2018 Sylvia Forman Award for an Outstanding Graduate Paper.

My second book project follows Punjabis to and within Italy, where they make up the largest non-EU workforce in Italian agriculture. Read across the border that divides Indian from Pakistani Punjab, the Punjabi migrant becomes a figure for thinking the politics of climate change in terms of the following questions: whose labor is secured, where, and at whose cost in exhausted and exhausting agrarian orders. 

I teach classes on statecraft, conflict, environmental politics, and climate change, as well as on community-engaged research.

In 2022-23, I was a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. I completed my PhD in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. You can contact me at mhayat* at-sign* nd* dot* edu

My research and teaching have been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, among multiple other grants from the University of Chicago, Stanford University, and the University of Notre Dame.

Publications

Book manuscript

2027. The Work of Water: Infrastructure, Bureaucratic Labor, and the Postcolonial Promise in Pakistan. Stanford University Press.

(2024) “Good Bureaucrats and God: The Ethical Labor of the Public.” Cultural Anthropology, Vol 39 (4) : 616-644 (pdf)

(2024) “Infrastructural Ecologies and the Politics of Knowledge: A Special Commentary.” Disputed Water Worlds, Engagement, Anthropology and Environment Society. 

(2023) “The Duty of Water: Land, Labor and the Racialization of Waste in Colonial and Contemporary Punjab.” Antipode, Vol 56 (4): 1329-1356 (pdf)

(2023) “Sovereignty-Troubling Accidents: A Conversation with Maira Hayat.” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review.

(2022) “Storage As Security: Damming Water in Pakistan.” Virtual Forum on Populist Ecologies. Political Geography (pdf)

(2020) “The Bureaucrat’s Wage: (De)valuations of Work in an Irrigation Bureaucracy.” Anthropology of Work Review, XLI (2): 86-96 (pdf)

(2020) “Introduction” to Special Issue (with Adam Sargent and Waqas Butt), Between Work and Labor: Valuing Action in South Asia. Anthropology of Work Review, XLI (2): 71-75 (pdf)

(2020) “Price.” Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon. (eds. Anand Pandian and Cymene Howe). Punctum Books (pdf)

(2019) “The Knot of Ecological Time: An Outlet, An Election and An Irrigation Office,” Ecological Times, Engagement, Anthropology and Environment Society.

(2019) “Empire’s Accidents: Law, Lies and Sovereignty in the ‘War on Terror’ in Pakistan,” Critique of Anthropology, 40 (1): 49-80 (pdf)

(2019) “States, Elections and the Promise of Newness: Thinking with Pakistan’s 2018 General Election,” Fieldsights, Society for Cultural Anthropology. April 8, 2019.

(2018) “Plumbing the depths in Lahore,” Anthropology News. March 15 2018.

(2009) “Still Taming the Turbulent Frontier? The State in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan”, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, 1 (2): 179-206.