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’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.