Education
- Ph.D. in South Asian Studies, University of Pennsylvania, USA (2011) — Dissertation: Flood of Memories: Narratives of Water and Loss in Tamil South India
- M.A. in Ethnomusicology, Wesleyan University, USA (2000)
- B.A. in Music and History, Hampshire College, USA (1996)
Research Interests
- Anthropology of disaster and crisis; water and environmental policy; anthropology of institutions and bureaucracy; folklore and ecology; music; colonialism and postcolonialism; trans-regionalism.
Biography
Dr. Aaron Mulvany has been Associate Professor of Social Development and Policy at Habib University since 2018, having joined as a founding faculty member and Assistant Professor in 2012. Over more than a decade, he has held a series of senior administrative roles: Director of Academic Systems (2014–2015), where he established the Office of the Registrar and its governing policies; Director of Academic Performance (2015–2017), where he built the university’s first systems for tracking academic performance and established the Writing Center and EHSAS student support center; interim Program Director of Communication & Design (2017–2018); Program Director of Social Development and Policy (2021–2024), during which SDP achieved a 36% graduate-school placement rate among graduates; and Assistant Dean of the School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (2023–2024), overseeing a multi-million-rupee budget across three academic programs and the ARZU and IDRAC research centers, and organizing Habib’s first all-university Senior Final Year Project Showcase. He also chaired the Faculty Senate (2020–2021) and currently sits on Habib’s NECHE Accreditation Committee (2024–2025) and Liberal Core Committee (2021–present).
Dr. Mulvany earned his Ph.D. in South Asian Studies from the University of Pennsylvania (2011), examining genealogies of natural disaster response and narratives of flood and loss in the former French territories of India. His research and teaching interests span disaster and policy anthropology, the Indian Ocean World, water development in the Global South, and folklore. He has also spent several years studying the historical development of the Balochi Banjo and the gharana of its inventor, Gul Muhammad, and is one of only two banjo players to have performed at the All Pakistan Music Conference.
He received Habib University’s Distinguished Award in Teaching (2022) and the Habib University Foundation Continuing Research Grant (2013), and was shortlisted for the International Convention of Asia Scholars’ Best Dissertation Prize (2013).
Selected Publications
- “Karnatic Music,” “Mridangam,” and “Pakistan, Music of,” in Music Around the World (ABC-CLIO, 2020).
- “Water control in South Asia: an introduction,” Water History, 6(2), 2014.
- “Policy Legends and Water Policy in the Union Territory of Puducherry,” Water History, 6(2), 2014.
- “High Dudgeon: Crafting Affective Narratives from (semi-) Official Texts,” RMN Newsletter 7, 2013.
- “From Resilience to Reliance: State Disruption of Traditional Flood Mitigation Strategies,” Narodna Umjetnost, 49(1), 2012.
- “The Colonial Foundations of Contemporary Flood Response in the Union Territory of Pondicherry,” Exploring History, 3(1), 2012.
Selected Recent Conference Activity
- “Dual Inscription of a Dying Tradition,” AAS-in-Asia Annual Meeting, 2023.
- “Innovating and Interrupting STS Education in Pakistan,” Society for the Social Studies of Science Annual Meeting, 2019.
- “Kings into Beggars: The Last Banjo Nawaz in Karachi,” European Association of Social Anthropologists Conference, 2018.
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