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.

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

Research Interests

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