Parmal Ahmed

Parmal Ahmed is an historian of South Asia and the environment, with particular interests in political ecology, environmental governance, and the political contract. At its core, her interest remains in the material, administrative, affective and environmental dimensions of power. 

Before beginning her PhD at Sciences Po, she was a Lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences and Liberal Arts (SSLA) at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA) in Karachi (Pakistan), where she taught a wide range of undergraduate courses in history and the humanities. These included “Pakistan History”, “Topics in Historiography”, “Research Methods in History”, “Philosophy”, “Logic”, and “Ethics”. She also designed and taught two interdisciplinary electives, “The People and Politics of the British Empire c. 1784–1997” and “Environmental Histories of Empire: Water, Land and Power”.

She remains deeply committed to education and to the university as an incubator of progressive and consequential conversations that shape our understanding of the world and the communities in which we live.

Education

MA History, SOAS, University of London
Her Master's thesis, “Native Childhoods in Colonial India: Identity Formation between the State and Community”, examined how the British colonial state classified, regulated, and politicised Indian childhoods, with particular attention to the intersections of gender, legislation, and community norms.

BA History, University College London
Her final-year dissertation, “Between Public and Private: The House in Renaissance Florence”, examined how spatial arrangements, gendered boundaries, and visual regimes shaped power, identity, and the performance of public and private life in Medici Florence.

The History of Flood Governance in the Colonial River Indus Basin, under the supervision of Giacomo Parrinello.

Her doctoral research examines the governance of flooding in the Lower Indus Basin from the British annexation of Sindh in 1843 to the construction and early operation of the Sukkur Barrage in the 1930s. The thesis reconstructs the political ecology of disaster governance, with particular attention to how responses to environmental crises shaped ideas of statecraft and the political contract.

To do so, she draws on a wide range of historical sources, including hagiographies, gazetteers, government correspondence, reports, surveys, maps, and photographs, alongside vernacular newspapers and literary and nationalist writings in Urdu, Persian, and Sindhi. She argues that disasters were more than spectacular caesurae in colonial environmental history: a persistent awareness of the possibility of disaster informed the production of the tools, ideologies, and administrative apparatuses through which colonial rule operated. In this sense, the colonial state was, in important respects, an “Emergency State.”

Her interest in this history emerged in part from the devastating floods that affected Pakistan in 2022, and from the wider debates surrounding climate crisis, adaptation, and the governance of environmental risk.

Conference Papers and Panels

• Annual Conference on South Asia, Madison, October 2025 — “From Classroom to Colony: The Agricultural School at Hyderabad and the Making of Agrarian Empire,” presented on the “Agricultural Change” panel.
• IBA SSLA Undergraduate Research Conference, 2025 — Panel Host and Moderator, “Violence and Memory.”
• “Political Islam: Then and Now,” IBA, January 2025 — Hosted and moderated a public talk by Dr. Khalid Masood.