Chris Moffat

Chris Moffat is a political and intellectual historian of modern South Asia. His research and teaching are grounded in his interest in the ‘public life’ of history, and so questions of commemoration, conjuring, silencing, and haunting are central to his work. His writing on the politics of the past draws on both archival and ethnographic methods. He joined Queen Mary in 2015, having completed his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in 2014.

Chris’ research focuses on questions of historical methodology, especially where the discipline of history grapples with alternative conceptions of time and space, the interruptive influence of the dead, and the fraying or tangled threads of memory. Chris has written extensively on the Indian revolutionary martyr Bhagat Singh (1907-1931), tracing his continuing political potential into the twenty-first century and asking what it means to take such revenant figures seriously in the history of political thought.

Chris has a consonant interest in alternative or dissident commemorative practices, particularly as they relate to public space, public art and the politics of archival and architectural preservation

From 2017-2020 Chris was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of History at QMUL, and in 2019 a Visiting Faculty Member in the Department of History, Government College University, Lahore. His research explored the contested status of ‘the past’ in Pakistan’s politics and public life. He focused on the role of the built environment in mediating relationships to history, charting conflicts over the construction, conservation and destruction of buildings in Pakistan’s major urban centres. This research will appear as a book manuscript provisionally titled 'Learning from Lahore: Architecture After Modernism in Urban Pakistan'. Chris is one of the contributors to the book Yasmeen Lari: Architecture for the Future (MIT Press, 2023).