Daniel Waqar (he/him/his) is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Tufts University. His doctoral dissertation focuses on the legal history and social practice of “unlawful assembly” laws across colonial and postcolonial South Asia. 

His research explores the connected nature of these colonial laws, which sought to criminalize small gatherings of people in public spaces as “riots.” These were applied capriciously by police administrators and bureaucrats, even after independence, as forms of quasi-martial law across domains of religious practice, public health, as well as political and labor mobilization across South Asia. His work is based on a multi-sited historical archive of court cases, intelligence records, police files, government gazettes, as well as poems and literary archives from across Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

He was recently named an Emerging Scholar by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation for his research on a “salient aspect of violence.” He received his MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford, where he served as Managing Editor of the St Antony’s International Review, the only graduate journal of international affairs at Oxford. He received his BA in History summa cum laude from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), where he was awarded a Harry S. Truman Scholarship for public service. He served as the undergraduate commencement speaker for his graduating class at UNLV.