Maira Hayat

A Kellogg Faculty Fellow since 2022, Maira Hayat is assistant professor of environment and peace studies in the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and a concurrent faculty member in the Department of Anthropology. She is a sociocultural anthropologist who conducts research at the intersection of bureaucracy, law, and the environment, drawing on ethnographic and archival methods. Hayat has been a Kellogg Institute faculty fellow since 2022.

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 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. 

Her work has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies. 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.

Hayat holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago.