Maria Rashid is a Research Fellow at the Partition of Identity (POI) project, a cross-university (UCL and LUMS) initiative that studies the Bengali community in Pakistan, tracing its history and exploring how its members traverse the space between being Pakistani and being Bengali.

Maria completed her doctorate from the School of Oriental and African Studies in Politics and International Studies in 2018, and subsequently published her monograph: Dying to Serve, Militarism, Affect and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army with Stanford University Press in 2020.  Winner of the Barnard S. Cohn Book prize 2022 and shortlisted for the 2021 IPS  and 2022 BASAS book awards, her book is a political ethnography with a deep interest in the nation-states’ ability to rationalise wars through its most poignant burden, the deaths of its soldiers.

A psychologist by training, she has worked with various national and international non-governmental organisations in Pakistan including heading a national women and child rights group for over 14 years. Her areas of specialism include gender, militarism and affect theory. She continues to be involved in training and research around violence and masculinities, and is associated with a number of networks and collaboratives both in South Asia and the UK.