Faryal Nadeem

Faryal Nadeem is an award-winning investigative journalist, interdisciplinary researcher, and educator from Lahore, Pakistan. Spanning a range of ethnographic and other projects, her work engages themes of religious violence, cultural anthropology, media infrastructures, and marginalized social worlds, integrating public scholarship, investigative reporting, and critical pedagogy. Leveraging her experience with a range of methodologies and disciplinary inclinations, she is currently interested in a historical-ethnomusicological exploration of Islamic aurality at the intersection of sedimented histories of Empire, mediated religious practices, urban sociality, and emergent forms of ethical subjectivities. Her work examines the political and affective affordances of devotional sound in shaping spatial imaginaries, circulating across ideological divides, and mediating forms of belonging, authority, and resistance in post-colonial urban Pakistan. Her scholarly interests further span histories and afterlives of war, madness and aesthetics, and rhetoric and performance. 

Faryal has received several fellowships, grants, and awards for her ethnographic research, pedagogical initiatives, and investigative reporting, including the Fellowship for Master’s Program in Global Studies from the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies; Summer Fellowship from the Orfalea Endowment; Global Studies Field Research Grant; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award from the University of California, Santa Barbara Graduate Division; and the Humanitarian Reporting Award from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).