Maira Hayat

Maira Hayat is assistant professor of environment and peace studies in the Keough School’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and a concurrent faculty member in the Department of Anthropology. She conducts research at the intersection of bureaucracy, law, and the environment, drawing on ethnographic and archival methods.

Before coming to Notre Dame, Hayat was a postdoctoral fellow in Stanford University’s Department of Anthropology and at the Woods Institute for the Environment. She earned her PhD from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago in December 2018. Hayat graduated from the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan in 2008 and holds an MSc in social anthropology from the University of Oxford.

Hayat’s current and first book project is based on her doctoral dissertation, “Ecologies of Water Governance in Pakistan: The Colony, the Corporation and the Contemporary,” which won the 2019 S. S. Pirzada Annual Dissertation Prize for best dissertation on Pakistan. A dissertation chapter, “The Gender of Corruption: Bureaucrats, Bodies, and the Female Complaint in an Irrigation Bureaucracy,” won the Association for Feminist Anthropology’s 2018 Sylvia Forman Prize for Outstanding Graduate Paper.

Hayat’s work has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies. Her publications, including a special issue she co-organized, have appeared in the Anthropology of Work Review, Critique of Anthropology, and Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford among others. (A full list of publications is available on her personal website.) Hayat’s community-engaged teaching on environmental violence and justice has been awarded a Cardinal Course Grant Award for Public Service and an artsCatalyst Grant (at Stanford University) and a Starr Lectureship Award at the University of Chicago.