Alfisha Sabri

Research

My PhD project, provisionally titled The Real and the Remembered: A Study of Mussoorie’s Production and Evolution through Travel Narratives (1825-2025), aims to study the historical representations of Indian hill stations across time. My primary focus is on Mussoorie, located in the Central Himalayan region and part of the present-day state of Uttarakhand in India. I start by investigating the historical colonial production of Mussoorie through colonial travel writing (and other records of travel)– scientific as well as sentimental– and the construction of the place in the colonial imagination. I trace the life, death, and commemoration of this colonial imagination. What it includes, excludes, and why? This is followed by its juxtaposition with the current hill station imagination, construction, and memorialisation. I work with archival (visual and textual), as well as oral sources.

With my project, I aim to contextualize the past and present purpose of hill stations in the colonial and postcolonial history of India and the British Empire, and the Himalayan scientific and sentimental exploration. I aim to contribute to scholarship on travel and travel writing, the history of space, and modern South Asia. My project is also an enquiry into the curation (and bias) of the archives, a reflection on methodology, and largely a grappling with the process of writing and telling History.

My project is supervised by Dr Thomas Simpson and Dr Guido van Meersbergen and is funded by the Wheeler History of Travel Writing Programme.

Background

I completed my Bachelor's and Master's in English Literature from the University of Delhi and Jamia Millia Islamia, respectively. During my BA and MA, while my major was Literature, I earned a minor in History. I was born and brought up in Mussoorie, after which I moved to Delhi for higher education. The different experiences I had in these two places got me interested in the historical production of space, the metropolitan and the peripheral, and my PhD project is, in many ways, an attempt to examine this through travel narratives in the specific case of Mussoorie.

Before enrolling in a PhD, I worked as a freelance researcher, editor, and translator with scholars and publishing houses based in India in areas such as Partition Studies, Food and Cultural Memory, Spatial Studies, Gender and Minority Studies, History of Sufism and Islam in the subcontinent, and Translation.

I can be reached at the email ID mentioned below.

Presentations

• Annual PG Conference. Department of History, University of Warwick, Coventry, June 2026
• 9thAnnual South Asia Conference 2026, Turbulence, Transformation, and Resilience: South Asia in a Changing Global Order, Dublin City University, Dublin, April 2026
• PHRC Annual Conference, Repurposing Photographic Materials: Transforming Social, Political, and Cultural Heritage, De Montfort University, Leicester, July 2025
• ‘Framing Imperial Fantasies in Hill Stations: A Study of Mussoorie's Landscape and Load-Carriers in Photographs, 1860-1920’, Workshop, South Asia in Global History, University of Warwick, Coventry, June 2025
• Annual PG Conference, Department of History, University of Warwick, Coventry, May 2025
• Wheeler History of Travel Writing Workshop, The Traveller’s Tale: Global Forms and Circulations, Warwick Venice Centre, Venice, November 2024
• American Comparative Literature Association Annual Conference, Thinking Race in a Comparative Perspective, via Zoom, April 2021
• Annual Student Seminar, Gendered Realities in Times of Growing Authoritarianism, Women’s Study Centre, Jesus & Mary College, Delhi, March 2021

Education

• 2024-2028: PhD in History, University of Warwick, Coventry
• 2021-2023: MA in English Literature, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi
• 2018-2021: BA (Honours) in English Literature, University of Delhi, Delhi

Conference Organisation

• Co-organiser, ‘Travel Writing and its Limits’ Wheeler Workshop, University of Warwick (23 June 2026)
• Co-founder and co-organiser, Launch Symposium, ‘Scholarship on the Indian Muslim Sphere’, Northumbria University (22 June 2026)
• Co-organiser, Annual History PG Conference, University of Warwick (3-4 June 2026)

Research Interests

• History of Modern South Asia
• History of Travel and Travel Writing (Modern)
• Himalayan Environmental and Scientific History
• History of Space
• Translation Studies