Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre at LUMS

Dr. Bilal Ahsan Malik, Associate Professor of Practice

Dr. Bilal Ahsan Malik has a Doctorate in Education (Culture & Communities) and a Masters in Education (Policy and Management), both from Harvard University. Alongside teaching at the School of Education, he also serves as Associate Dean of Student Affairs and Director of Academic Advising/Student Success at LUMS.

Dr. Malik’s research interests lie at the intersection of education and cultural anthropology (particularly the anthropology of religion and secularism). He is interested in understanding the ways in which educational contexts shape the subjectivities and life pathways of students, including aspects not envisioned by educational practitioners and policy makers. In the past, he has conducted an ethnography of a madrasa (Islamic seminary) by living for a year inside a madrasa in Bhera (Punjab, Pakistan). More recently, he has begun experimenting with integrating quantitative methods in his research. Alongside collaborators in the Economics Department, one of his current projects uses surveys and interviews to compare labour market, behavioural and attitudinal outcomes for madrasa graduates who acquired a mainstream undergraduate degree vs. graduates who exclusively focused on Islamic subjects (dars-e-nizami). This is the first South Asian study that systematically maps madrasa students’ pathways after their graduation.

Dr. Malik has almost two decades of experience in teaching, educational administration and student support, including at Harvard University where he taught in the Department of Anthropology and served as the Allston Burr Resident Dean of the largest undergraduate house with ~600 affiliates. At Harvard, his course fulfilled the core requirement of the undergraduate minor in Educational Studies and he received certificates for Teaching Excellence six times. His other experiences include a BA in Political Science (Amherst College, USA), an MBA (LUMS), management consulting (McKinsey & Company, New York) and co-founding an educational non-profit (https://shaheenpakistan.org).