Amna Qayyum is a historian of modern South Asia with intersecting research and teaching interests in global economic history and modern Islamic thought. She is also interested in comparative and connected approaches towards studying decolonization and the Cold War.
Her current project is titled "The Knotty Problem of Numbers: Population Control and Politics of the Family in Pakistan, 1947-71". It draws on debates between bureaucrats, social scientists, housewives, and Islamic modernists, and places the post-colonial family at the center of a multi-scalar project of global development. Her work for this project has been supported by the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), the American Institute of Pakistan Studies (AIPS), the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Foundation, and the Joint Center for Economics and History at Harvard University.
Prior to attending Princeton, she received a M.A in History from Tufts University and a B.A summa cum laude in Economics and History from Connecticut College. She also worked on USAID and State Department programs on governance and education in Pakistan.
For the 2019-20 academic year, Amna is a Graduate Fellow at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS).
