Personal statement

I currently serve as one of the Deputy Associate Principals for Research and Knowledge Exchange at the University of Strathclyde where my portfolio includes Research Culture. I lead the Wellcome Trust funded institutional research culture project, Cultures of Collaborative Research and was the first chair of the university’s Race Equality Steering Group.

I am a researcher in English Studies where my primary interests are in ideas of cultural value and writing about travel responding to intersectional forms of difference, especially along the axes of race, gender, sexuality, and diasporic belonging. My most recent major work is Desi Queers: LGBTQ+ South Asians and Cultural Belonging in Britain (Hurst, 2025) co-authored with Rohit Dasgupta (LSE) and DJ Ritu (Club Kali). This work developed from our British Academy project, Cross-Border Queers: The Story of South Asian Migrants in the UK. A panel discussion on the history of queer South Asian activism in the diaspora with Pawan Dhall, Jasbir Puar, Ian Iqbal Rashid, and Sandip Roy is available here.

I have conducted equalities-led research across several projects including working with a leading refugee and migrant collective to address structural homophobia in the organisation (PI, States of Desire, AHRC); working with heritage sector partners in Scotland to address structural racism (PI AHRC EDI Fellowship; PI White Thinking, AHRC). Alongside this, I served on the Steering Group of the Scottish Government commissioned Empire, Slavery and Scotland’s Museum project which conducted the largest national consultation on public attitudes to race and heritage. I have also collaborated on several heritage projects including Curating Discomfort at the Hunterian Museum where I was involved in the work around the Jamaican Galliwasp (which has been repatriated).

My work on the experience of travel through the lens of race and gender began with British travellers and tourists in Greece through the nineteenth century who relied on racialised discourses to position Northern Europeans as the real inheritors of Ancient Greece (which often included its material history). A recurring theme in this work was how the tangible heritage of Greece was whitewashed as ‘European’ while Greece’s intangible heritage was represented as irrecoverably corrupted by Ottoman occupation and the influence of Islam (Mahn 2012). The relationship between travel, cultural value, and heritage has underpinned all my work.

My interest in the Islamophobia within heritage contexts led to my selection as one of the AHRC/British Council UnBox Fellows for 2013 and a subsequent impact-led grant on how to rehabilitate one of Punjab’s historic Mughal-era gardens to public memory (PI, AHRC, A Punjabi Palimpsest).

My work on Punjab and the run-up to Partition, along with its aftermath, was informed by how folk culture had been (mis)represented in the accounts of British colonial folklorists and anthropologists who had key roles in influencing colonial policies that created official social categories which did not accommodate the complexity of real social structures (Malik, Mahn, et al 2020; Mahn 2017).

This work led to two collaborations with organisations working with Punjabi heritage as part of the AHRC grant Creative Interruptions. This large 3-year grant was awarded as part of the Connected Communities programme and was based on collaborative and co-designed research and impact.

Key outputs included working with the Preet Nagar Residency over two years to co-design Melas to open alternative forums for conservation and heritage. This work was conducted alongside an intervention in Amritsar to design more inclusive consultation with marginalised Partition refugee heritage communities displaced by modern conservation planning. See the Best in Heritage presentation for further details.