Maira Hayat

Biography & Research

Maira Hayat is assistant professor of environment and peace studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame and a concurrent faculty member in Notre Dame's Department of Anthropology. She is also a core-affiliated faculty member of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies 

Hayat conducts research at the intersection of bureaucracy, law, and the environment, drawing on ethnographic and archival methods. Her 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 the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, among others. 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.

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. From 2022-23, she was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Hayat earned a 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 M.Sc. in social anthropology from the University of Oxford.

Courses

• Coloniality and Climate Change (master of global affairs elective)
• Environmental Anthropology and the intersectionality of justice (master of global affairs elective)

In the Media

• A history of US interference worsened Pakistan's devastating floods (The Washington Post)
• Pakistan floods drive calls for climate justice (Nikkei Asia)
• "A monsoon on steroids." What to know about Pakistan’s catastrophic floods (Time)
• Pakistan drowns in floods of others’ making (New Lines Magazine)
• Pakistan struggling to cope with scale of disaster (DW News)
• Is Pakistan responsible for its worst floods? No, we all are. Here's how you contributed to the disaster. (CNN NEWS18)
• Commentary on Pakistan floods (BBC News)
• Pakistan’s floods boost calls for compensation to poor nations (DAWN)
• Pakistan lost $30 billion in floods. Should rich polluting countries pay up? (VICE World News)