Ilsa Abdul Razzak (she/her/hers)

Ilsa is a fourth-year student and PhD candidate, working on the late Mughal Empire in South Asia. She recently completed fieldwork for her dissertation in Pakistan and the UK. Ilsa has been studying manuscripts on rituals written in vernacular languages such as Dakhni, Gojri, and Hindavi, and texts on Islamic jurisprudence authored in the late seventeenth century. Broadly, Ilsa is interested in understanding the social history of jurists and scholars in the Mughal Empire, which will be the focus of her dissertation. She has presented some of her work at the 2023 AAS Annual Conference, at the 51st ACSA 2023 in Madison, at graduate student workshops on campus, and at student-led discussions in Karachi. Her language training includes paleography skills in Hindavi, and advanced Persian and Arabic. Apart from her primary field which is early modern South Asia, Ilsa's secondary fields are modern South Asia, comparative colonialisms, and Persianate poetics and texts. 

Ilsa completed an MA in South Asia Studies in 2022 from the University of Washington. Her research focused on a multi-volume legal text, the Fatava-e Alamgiri, compiled in the late seventeenth century. Prior to working on early modern South Asia, Ilsa has done research work with oral histories, and histories of the Partition of South Asia. Her undergraduate thesis focused on the experiences of women who migrated from India to Pakistan in the 1980s and 1990s. A condensed version of this research was published as a cover story. In her free time, Ilsa watches old Pakistani dramas, reads Urdu poetry, cooks, and writes (sporadically) for her Wordpress blog (now a Substack).