Nichola Khan

Nichola Khan is Professor of Human Geography and Ethnography. She works at the interface of migration, violence, and mental illness/health in conflict, post-conflict, and postcolonial societies: specifically, using ethnography to research urban violence among Pakistan’s Urdu-speaking migrant communities in the postcolonial megacity of Karachi, transnational refugee migration from Afghanistan, and more recently empty spaces, including homeless sites, in French migrant psychiatry in Paris. She is interested in developing interdisciplinary theory‑ using philosophical, existential, anthropological, anticolonial and literary approaches- to think about challenges related to forced displacement, migration and mobility, colonial geneaologies in everyday life, questions of race and culture, and on the interiority and materiality of violence. She has published five books: ‘Mohajir Militancy in Pakistan’ (2010, 2012, Routledge); ‘Cityscapes of Violence in Karachi’ (2017 ed., Oxford University Press; Hurst & Co.); 'Mental Disorder: Anthropological Insights (2017, University of Toronto Press); ‘Arc of the Journeyman: Afghan Migrants in England’ (2020, University of Minnesota Press); and 'The Breath of Empire' (2023, Studies in Literary Anthropology series, Palgrave Macmillan). She is an International Fellow at the Institut Convergences Migrations (ICM) Paris, and has held visiting Scholarships at the National University of Singapore (2017) and Harvard Medical School (2020). She is currently working on projects funded by ICM and the AHRC (DISTERRA Network). She is a Trustee and Council member of the Royal Anthropological Institute. She regularly provides legal expert witness testimony and reports. Please contact her for PhD supervision or research enquiries in these and related areas.