CLUSTER LEAD
Dr. Fuyubi Nakamura
Department of Asian Studies and Museum of Anthropology, UBC
Fuyubi Nakamura (中村冬日) is a socio-cultural anthropologist. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Studies and Curator, Asia at the Museum of Anthropology, the University of British Columbia (UBC). She specializes in the anthropology of art, museum studies, and material and visual culture studies. She taught in these fields at the Australian National University (2007-2010) and University of Tokyo (2012-2013), and curated exhibitions internationally prior to joining UBC in 2014.
Her research through exhibition curation includes A Future for Memory: Art and Life after the Great East Japan Earthquake (2021) and Entangled Territories: Tibet Through Images (2025–2026). Her publications include Asia through Art and Anthropology (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013) and Hokkaidō 150: Settler Colonialism and Indigeneity in Modern Japan and Beyond (Critical Asian Studies, 2019).
Fuyubi studied Indian art with Professor Partha Mitter as an undergraduate and have visited India five times and have maintained interest since the early 1990s. She has also had opportunities to visit Sri Lanka, Nepal and most recently Pakistan to explore rich arts and cultures of these countries in South Asia.
More: fuyubi.arts.ubc.ca
MEMBERS
Dr. Yasmin Amaratunga
Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, UBC
Yasmin Amaratunga is the curator of collections in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia and is an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria. She completed her doctoral degree in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, United Kingdom, and a postdoctoral curatorial fellowship at the University of Victoria. Bridging art history and object-based studies, her interdisciplinary research focuses on community-engaged curation, material culture, and museum studies.
More: ahva.ubc.ca/profile/yasmin-amaratunga/
Jasleen Kaur Bagga
Department of Asian Studies, UBC
Jasleen Kaur Bagga is interested in Punjabi literary culture, print publics, and the intellectual histories of twentieth-century Punjab. For her doctoral project in the Department of Asian Studies at UBC, she is studying how Punjabi magazines shape the modern literary consciousness and political imagination in colonial and postcolonial Punjab. Her master’s research focused on Punjabi Dalit literature and a distinct reconstruction of the region’s historiography through its engagements with caste, labour, and aesthetics. Before joining UBC, she completed her undergraduate and master’s training in English literature. Subsequently, she worked at secondary and post-secondary levels, teaching courses in critical thinking and academic writing at Ashoka University in India.
More: asia.ubc.ca/profile/jasleen-bagga/
Dr. Melia Belli Bose
Department of Art History and Visual Studies, UVic
Melia Belli Bose PhD is Associate Professor of South Asian Art History at the University of Victoria, Canada. Her research engages with visual cultures of early modern and contemporary South Asia (north India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh). Her publications include Royal Umbrellas of Stone: Memory, Politics, and Public Identity in Rajput Funerary Art (Brill, 2015); the edited volumes Women, Gender, and Art in Asia ca. 1500-1900 (Routledge, 2016), Intersections: Visual Cultures of Islamic Cosmopolitanism (University of Florida Press, 2021); Threads of Globalization: Fashion, Textiles, and Gender in Asia in the Long Twentieth Century (Manchester University Press, 2024); guest edited journal editions; and articles and book chapters. Dr. Belli Bose’s current book project, Creative Interventions: Art and Cultural Activism in Bangladesh examines artworks that critique, help heal, and create community in a changing Bangladesh. She is also conducting research on contemporary Dalit art, exploring how Millennial Dalit artists engage Buddhism, politics, and social identity and forge alliances with marginalized communities throughout the world.
More: uvic.ca/finearts/ahvs/people/faculty/profiles/melia-belli-bose.php
Somaia Dorzadeh
Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, UBC
Somaia Dorzadeh is a graduate student in Critical and Curatorial Studies at the University of British Columbia. She obtained an MFA in Design and a BA (Honors) in Art History from Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar (VCUarts Qatar). Dorzadeh has served as an Adjunct Faculty member in the Art History Department at VCUarts Qatar, where she taught Global Art History. Originally from Baluchistan, her research interests focus on the Baluch community and material culture in the diaspora, exploring homemaking practices through research, design, and curation.
Md Imtiaj Islam
Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, UBC
Md Imtiaj Islam is a visual artist, educator, and researcher. He is currently a graduate student in Visual Arts in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at UBC. His work reflects his travel experiences and focuses on archiving and documentation through personal narrative storytelling. He is particularly interested in researching artists’ travel sketchbooks in South Asia. Over the past 11 years, Imtiaj has exhibited his work in Bangladesh, Hong Kong, China, Italy, and India. His accomplishments include research-based projects, journals, exhibitions, and academic achievements. He received the 2025–26 Fellowship in the Chobi Mela XI Fellowship Programme at Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, as well as the Sovereign Asian Art Prize in 2021, the National Award for Best Installation in 2021, an Artist Grant from the Brihatta Art Foundation, and an Honourable Mention in the Young Art Exhibition 2025.
Imtiaj works as an assistant professor in the Department of Fine Arts (Drawing & Painting) at Islamic University in Bangladesh. He holds a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Drawing & Painting from Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata, obtained through an ICCR scholarship. Alongside his teaching responsibilities, he has experience in assistant curation and publication design.
Ali Shariq Jamali
School for the Contemporary Arts, SFU
Ali Shariq Jamali is a Pakistan-born, Vancouver-based interdisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher. He holds a BFA from the National College of Arts and an MA in Art and Design Studies from Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. He is pursuing a PhD in Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. His work has been presented across Pakistan, Canada, and internationally. Recent presentations include Fragment Index: DA·AUSH·KU at THIS Gallery, Wajood-e-Irtika: What Remains After Erasure at Audain Gallery, and Non-Functional Thoughts at The Wrong Biennale. He contributed to the development of Rashid Rana’s EART: A Manifesto of Possibilities at Manchester International Festival and was an artist-in-residence with VASL Artists’ Association, Karachi.
His practice approaches memory as a technical and cultural process, continually reorganized and contested. Focusing on digital memory, cultural amnesia, archaeology, and technological mediation, he examines fragmented, repurposed, and forgotten forms. Across installation, photography, video, and sculpture, he considers how memory is externalized through objects, images, archives, computational systems, and cultural institutions, shaping what is preserved, reconstructed, made visible, anticipated, or erased. The Indus city of Mohenjo-daro becomes a site of conceptual excavation through which he investigates archaeological fragments, undeciphered histories, digital reconstruction, environmental deterioration, and contemporary politics of visibility, heritage, and inheritance.
More: sfu.ca/sca/people/phd—visiting-scholar.html#AliShariqJamali
Krishna Kumar
Department of Asian Studies, UBC
Krishna Kumar is a PhD student i n the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. His research examines the soc ial history of early modern South Asia, with a particular focus on Mughal Kotah in present-day eastern Rajasthan, India. His broader interests span infrastructure, logistics, material culture, labor, gender, and caste history, Persianate India, and early modern global history. He works with multilingual archival materials including Persian, Hindavi, and Marathi.
More: asia.ubc.ca/profile/krishna-kumar/
Dr. Naveena Naqvi
Department of Asian Studies, UBC
I am a historian of early modern and modern South Asia. My book-in-progress is titled Afghans Between Empires: A History of Self-Authorship in North India. It explores who the Afghans of North India understood themselves to be in the period before their evolving cultural, regional, and political orientations were sidetracked by the formalization of colonial rule. My other research interests are centred on status-making in Mughal India and the social history of Hindustani music. Since 2020, I have been a member of the Balzan Seminar.
More: asia.ubc.ca/profile/naveena-naqvi
Fahad Naveed
Department of Asian Studies, UBC
Fahad Naveed is a visual artist, filmmaker, and interdisciplinary researcher. He is currently a PhD Candidate in the Department of Asian Studies at UBC, where his research focuses on border cinemas and the cross-border afterlives of films. His current work engages with informal pirate archives of Bollywood cinema in Pakistan.
Fahad is a curator of Separation’s Geography, a cross-border collaborative project that brings together artists and creative practitioners from Pakistan and India. He is also a founding member of the Mandarjazail Collective, an interdisciplinary artist collective, and the Documentary Association of Pakistan, a filmmaker-run initiative. Fahad has served as a programmer for the travelling Chalta Phirta Documentary Festival and the Framing Asia film series at UBC.
Fahad also works as the Media and Research Coordinator at the Public Humanities Hub, UBC, and serves as the Communications and Marketing Coordinator for UBC Vancouver’s Graduate Student Society. Prior to joining UBC, he studied documentary filmmaking at New York University as a Fulbright Scholar. He also worked as an editorial staffer at Dawn newspaper in Pakistan.
More: asia.ubc.ca/profile/fahad-naveed
Dr. M.V. Ramana
School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, UBC
M.V. Ramana is the Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security, Professor at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and the co-director of the Centre for India and South Asia Research, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He is the author of Nuclear is not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change (Verso books, 2024), The Power of Promise: Examining Nuclear Energy in India (Penguin Books, 2012), and co‑editor of Prisoners of the Nuclear Dream (Orient Longman, 2003). He is a member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM), the International Nuclear Risk Assessment Group (INRAG), the Network of Scientific and Technical Research Institutions and Experts in Support of the Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the Forum on Physics and Society of the American Physical Society, the Scientific Advisory Board of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War Canada, the Canadian Pugwash Group, and the team that produces the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Leo Szilard Award from the American Physical Society, and the 2026 Alliance for Nuclear Accountability DC Days award.
More: sppga.ubc.ca/profile/m-v-ramana/
Sneha Roychoudhury
Department of Asian Studies, UBC
Sneha Roychoudhury is a PhD student in the Asian Studies Department at UBC. She is interested in questions of performance in state-making, the sacrality of state and nation, and the imaginations of sacred/political geographies in India’s borderlands, particularly the Himalayas. For her doctoral project she is working on precarities of historical formation/s as it intersects with icons, narratives and memory(s) in circulation at the frontiers of state-making. She does this through the ethnographic specificity of museum-shrines that venerate martyr figures from the Indian armed forces, across the Himalayan Borderlands. This project emerges from her wider interests in memory-making, orality and cultures of remembering and forgetting through space and place making in South Asia.
Sneha is also currently a Doctoral Writing Consultant at the Centre for Writing and Scholarly Communications at UBC and likes to experiment with her scholarly voice as and when she can.
More: asia.ubc.ca/profile/sneha-roychoudhury
Dr. Sharanjit Sandhra
Department of History, UFV
Sharanjit Sandhra (Sharn) is a historian, educator, storyteller, and founder of Belonging Matters Consulting. Sharn has more than two decades of experience in museum curation, community heritage work, and mentoring youth. She became the first Punjabi and Sikh to complete her PhD from the Department of History at UBC in 2022. Her PhD looks at the affective experiences of museum visitors through a critical race theory lens with the dissertation is titled Museums as Spaces of Belonging: Racialized Power in the Margins. Sharn is a passionate activist and dynamic storyteller, building bridges between community and academia. She has been featured in the Knowledge Network series B.C: An Untold History, is co-author of Challenging Racist BC: 150 Years and Counting, and has been featured on local, and international podcasts and media.
More: ufv.ca/history/faculty-and-staff/sandhra-sharanjit.htm
Dr. Sadia Shirazi
Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, UBC
Sadia Shirazi is an interdisciplinary scholar of modern and contemporary art, specializing in transcultural histories of South Asia, the Indian Ocean and its diasporas. Their current book project explores abstraction in the work of artists living and working across the Indian subcontinent, Indian Ocean, Japan, Europe and the US during the second half of the twentieth century, amidst the ongoing movements of decolonization and black liberation. Shirazi has contributed writing to peer-reviewed publications including Art Journal and Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, in addition to numerous artists catalogues. As a critic, their writing has been published in e-flux, Frieze, ArtForum, Bidoun and C Magazine. Previously a curator of international art at the Tate Modern in London, Shirazi is currently Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at the University of British Columbia.
More: ahva.ubc.ca/profile/sadia-shirazi/
Dr. Sara Shneiderman
Department of Anthropology and the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, UBC
Sara Shneiderman is a socio-cultural anthropologist with long-term ethnographic commitments in the Himalayas and South Asia (Nepal, India, and Tibetan areas of China), and emerging research in British Columbia. She serves as Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology as well as in School of Public Policy and Global Affairs (SPPGA)/Institute of Asian Research (IAR) at UBC. From 2025-2030, She holds the Ivan Head South-North IDRC Chair at SPPGA. In this role, she is working to convene students, scholars, and practitioners from across the Global South and North to share scholarship and best practices in the fields of disaster resilience, migration, and Indigenous futures. She also serves as Co-Lead of the UBC Disaster Resilience Research Network and UBC Himalaya Program.
Her research explores how social transformation is shaped by dynamics of citizenship and belonging (in relation to Indigenous, ethnic, religious and gender identities); cross-border mobility; conflict and political mobilization; territory and land use; development discourses and practices; and disaster aftermath and preparedness. Her current projects include Restructuring Life: Conflict, Disaster and Transformation in Nepal, an ethnography of the twin processes of post-conflict state restructuring and post-disaster reconstruction in Nepal from the perspective of lived experience in the hill district of Dolakha.
More: shneiderman.arts.ubc.ca
Dr. Kiran K. Sunar
Department of Asian Studies, UBC
Kiran K. Sunar is an Assistant Professor in Punjabi Language, Literature, and Culture. Kiran’s research and teaching coagulate around literature, religion, and culture in Punjab across its borders and into its diasporas, exploring questions of gender, sexuality, religion, and ecology. Their most recent work focuses on literary, visual, and performance traditions from early modern to contemporary cross-border Punjab and its diasporas. Their current major project traces the transformations of narrative and performance within the Sohnī Mahīnwāl story tradition, a ubiquitous, riverine tale about two lovers who die tragically in their quest to unite.
More: https://asia.ubc.ca/profile/kiran-sunar/
Dr. Mark Turin
The Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies, UBC
Mark Turin is a linguistic anthropologist, occasional radio presenter, and Associate Professor in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is also Affiliated Faculty at Tokyo College, The University of Tokyo. His research and teaching focus on language documentation, revitalization, reclamation and rights; oral traditions; archives; digital tools; language mapping; and the politics of linguistic diversity.
For more than two decades, Turin’s regional work has centred on the Himalayan region, particularly Nepal, northern India and Bhutan, alongside more recent collaborative work in the Pacific Northwest. Since 1996, he has worked in partnership with Thangmi-speaking communities in eastern Nepal and Darjeeling, and since 2014 with members of the Heiltsuk First Nation through the Heiltsuk Language Mobilization Partnership.
Turin founded the World Oral Literature Project and co-founded the Digital Himalaya Project in 2000. He is also principal investigator of the Relational Lexicography project, which develops collaborative, community-informed approaches to dictionary work with marginalized languages. He is the author or co-author of five books, editor or co-editor of twelve volumes, and editor of an open-access series on oral literature.
More: markturin.arts.ubc.ca/
Dr. Helena Zeweri
Department of Anthropology, UBC
Helena Zeweri is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The University of British Columbia and Faculty Affiliate at the UBC Centre for Migration Studies where she organizes the Borders Research cluster. She is the author of Between Care and Criminality: Marriage, Citizenship, and Family in Australian Social Welfare (Rutgers University Press). Her current research examines deterrence-based border regimes and refugee rights advocacy in Australia and the United States. Helena’s work has been published in the Journal of Refugee Studies, the International Feminist Journal of Politics, and Ethnos, among others. She is also a member of the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association, a collective that aims to amplify diasporic art, writing, and scholarship.