Ali Raj

Jun 4, 2026

Research Director, Radio Preservation Task Force, Library of Congress · PhD, Columbia University · Journalist and Audio Producer

New York City, USA

Radio Preservation Task Force, Library of Congress (Research Director, 2026–present)

Columbia University (PhD Communications, 2019–2026)

Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights, Columbia (Research Assistant, 2023–present)

Columbia Journalism Investigations (Postgraduate Reporting Fellow, 2018–19)

Herald Pakistan (Staff Writer, 2016–17)

The Express Tribune (Subeditor / Shift In-charge, 2014–16)

Samaa TV (Content Producer and Presenter, 2010–14)

IBA Karachi (BS Social Sciences and Liberal Arts, 2017)

Biography

Ali Raj is a Pakistani-American journalist, media historian, audio producer, and archivist whose career bridges two distinct worlds — the award-winning investigative journalism of the Los Angeles Times and the scholarly recovery of South Asian sound, language, and intellectual history. He was born in Pakistan, where he worked for a decade as a content producer and presenter at Samaa TV, a subeditor and shift in-charge at The Express Tribune, and a staff writer at Herald Pakistan, one of the country's most respected long-form English-language publications, before moving to the United States for graduate study. He holds a BS in Social Sciences and Liberal Arts from the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi (2017); an MA in Journalism from Columbia University (2018), where his thesis examined how Coke Studio became a vehicle for Coca-Cola's cultural expansion in Pakistan; and a PhD in Communications from Columbia University (2019–2026), where his advisors were the late media sociologist Todd Gitlin and historian of communications Richard R. John, with a committee including Michael Schudson (one of the leading sociologists of journalism), musicologist Alessandra Ciucci, ethnomusicologist Susan Boynton, and intellectual historian Faisal Devji.

His Muck Rack bio carries a single line of Urdu verse: Ishq khud ik sayl hai, sayl ko letā hai thām — "Love itself is a flood; it is what holds the flood back." The line, from the ghazal tradition, functions less as a personal statement than as an intellectual signature: it points to the aesthetic and philosophical tradition — the Indo-Islamic literary and sonic heritage — that runs through his scholarship, his podcast, his curatorial work, and his journalism. He describes himself as a journalist and musician. In 2026 he was appointed Research Director of the Radio Preservation Task Force at the Library of Congress, the national body coordinating the identification, preservation, and access of radio recordings across the United States.

Pakistan Journalism Career

Raj's journalism career began in Pakistan in 2010, when he joined Samaa TV as a content producer and on-air presenter — entering television journalism during one of the most turbulent and consequential periods in Pakistani media history, when the proliferation of private television channels was transforming the country's information landscape and the political pressures on broadcast journalism were intensifying. He worked at Samaa TV until 2014, developing the on-air and production skills that would later inform his audio work, then moved to The Express Tribune — the English-language Pakistani daily associated with the International Herald Tribune — where he served as subeditor and shift in-charge until 2016, handling the copy flow and editorial decisions of a daily national publication under deadline. His final Pakistani journalism role was as a staff writer at Herald, Dawn's monthly magazine of long-form journalism and political analysis, in 2016–17. His Herald feature "A Language in Search of a Nation: The case for Urdu as Pakistan's official language" (May 2017) is the piece that most directly anticipates his subsequent scholarly focus — the history, aesthetics, and political significance of Urdu as a medium of public life.

Columbia Journalism School and the Marshall Islands Investigation

Raj arrived at Columbia Journalism School for his master's degree in 2017. His MA thesis examined Coke Studio — the Pakistani music franchise co-produced by Coca-Cola and Strings, which became one of the most watched music programmes in the country and across South Asia — as a case study in how a multinational corporation expanded its cultural footprint through a model that appeared to celebrate local musical traditions while pursuing global commercial objectives. The thesis's subject — the intersection of commercial media, musical heritage, and cultural sovereignty — anticipates the concerns that structure his PhD research on piracy, the cassette boom, and the political economy of sound in South Asia.

After completing his MA in 2018, Raj was awarded a Postgraduate Reporting Fellowship at Columbia Journalism Investigations — the investigative reporting unit of Columbia Journalism School. The fellowship took him to the Marshall Islands, where he reported on the health consequences of decades of US nuclear weapons testing on a Pacific nation whose musicians and oral historians were losing their voices to thyroid cancer caused by radiation exposure. His Los Angeles Times story "In Marshall Islands, radiation threatens tradition of handing down stories by song" (November 2019) is the piece through which he became known to American journalism audiences — a reported feature that wove together nuclear science, environmental justice, Pacific culture, and the specific human cost of radiation on the musicians and oral historians who carried Marshallese cultural memory in their voices. The story was accompanied by a South China Morning Post piece on the Marshall Islands' democratic politics and its complicated relationship with both the United States and China. The reporting won nine awards across five categories in 2019 and 2020, and was cited by BBC Radio 4's Sideways in 2022 and by the William J. Perry Project's At the Brink podcast in 2023.

PhD Research: Sound, Aesthetics, and the Intellectual History of South Asia

Raj's doctoral research at Columbia, completed in 2026, sits at the intersection of communication history, sound studies, intellectual history, and Islamic studies — a combination that reflects both his committee's disciplinary breadth and his own unusual career formation. His central concerns are the history of Urdu as a medium of public communication, the sonic and aesthetic dimensions of Muslim cultural life in South Asia, the political history of sound in East Pakistan from 1947 to 1971, and the digital transformation of listening practices in the region through piracy, cassette culture, and the internet. His published and forthcoming work clusters around three main areas.

The first is the history of sound in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) before and after partition — the ways in which the newly created state of Pakistan tried to construct a Muslim national identity through radio, sound, and Urdu, in a province where the majority population spoke Bengali and had a distinct musical and literary heritage. His paper "Sounding Muslim: Listening to Urdu and 'Muslim Phonology' in East Pakistan (1947–1971)," accepted in Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, examines how phonological categories were deployed in a political project of Muslim belonging. His companion piece "Back to The Future: Naushād Nūrī and the Untold History of Urdu in East Pakistan," forthcoming in the Journal of Urdu Studies, recovers a specific figure in that history.

The second area is piracy and digital listening — how informal media distribution, cassette bootlegging, and internet piracy transformed the experience and political economy of music in South Asia. "It's a Habit Now: Portals, Piracy and Digital Listening Practices in South Asia," forthcoming in a University of Pennsylvania Press volume on global internet histories edited by Eszter Zimanyi, places South Asian digital listening in the broader context of the "long 1990s" as a turning point in media studies. His 2018 conference paper at the Museum of the Moving Image on "how Pakistan's biggest CD empire came crashing to the ground" — the Shalimar Recording Company — anticipates this research thread. A more recent conference paper, "Pirate State: Shalimar Recording Co. and the Cassette Boom in Pakistan (1974–2005)," presented in Paris in 2025, develops it further.

The third area is the broader intellectual history of aesthetics and communication in the Indo-Islamic tradition — specifically the concept of faṣāḥat (eloquence, refined speech) in Urdu rhetoric and its inheritance from late colonial India. His paper "Euphony and Flow: The Inheritance of Urdu faṣāḥat in Late Colonial India," presented at the 51st Annual Conference on South Asia in 2023, and his broader project "Crack in the Mirror of Wonder: Towards a theory of communication in South Asia," currently in review at South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, represent an attempt to construct a communications theory grounded in the specific philosophical and aesthetic traditions of the subcontinent rather than in Western communication science.

Sounding Board Podcast and the National Archives of Pakistan

In 2024, Raj launched Sounding Board — an audio series about South Asian music, Islamic sound arts, and the Urdu literary tradition, produced with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Humanities New York. Described by Dawn's Images as "less a conventional podcast and more an intellectual listening room," Sounding Board features readings of essays by influential Urdu scholars, musicologists, poets, and critics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — texts from a nearly forgotten archive that Raj has spent years excavating — exploring themes of identity, inheritance, and imagination through the inshāʾiyah tradition of Urdu discursive prose, which unfolds as an invitation to think rather than an argument to be resolved. Two seasons have been completed as of 2026. The podcast was featured in Expresso, Express News Pakistan's cultural supplement, in 2026.

Alongside the podcast, Raj is developing a permanent exhibit at the National Archives of Pakistan Museum in Islamabad titled "Sonic Histories of Muslim Renaissance in British India" — a curatorial project that extends his scholarly recovery work into a public institutional form, making the history of Islamic sound arts accessible to Pakistani audiences in a national archival setting.

Library of Congress: Radio Preservation Task Force

In 2026, Raj was appointed Research Director of the Radio Preservation Task Force at the Library of Congress — the national initiative coordinating the identification, preservation, and access of historical radio recordings held by broadcasters, archives, universities, and private collectors across the United States. The Radio Preservation Task Force was established by the American Archive of Public Broadcasting with Library of Congress support to address the fragility and dispersal of America's radio heritage; its research directors work across the broadcast history, archival science, and sound studies communities to locate, document, and advocate for the preservation of at-risk recordings. Raj's appointment brings his specific expertise in sound history, digital media, and the political economy of recording to a role with direct consequences for the accessibility of the American sonic past.

Selected Awards

Emerging Scholar Award

11th International Conference on Communication & Media Studies · 2026

Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism — Public Health (First Place)

2020 · Marshall Islands reporting

John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism (Citation)

2020 · Marshall Islands reporting

LA Press Club — Environmental Reporting

62nd Annual SoCal Journalism Awards · 2020

SEJ Outstanding Explanatory Reporting (Second Place)

Society of Environmental Journalists · 2020 · Large Newsroom

SPJ Sigma Delta Chi Award — Non-Deadline Reporting

Society of Professional Journalists · 2019

California Journalism Awards — In-Depth Reporting, Digital (First Place)

California News Publishers Association · 2019

Society of Fellows / Heyman Center Public Humanities Graduate Fellowship

Columbia University · 2024

Selected Publications

"Sounding Muslim: Listening to Urdu and 'Muslim Phonology' in East Pakistan (1947–1971)"Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture (Accepted)
"It's a Habit Now: Portals, Piracy and Digital Listening Practices in South Asia"In Turning Points in Media Studies: The Long 1990s in Global Internet Histories, ed. Eszter Zimanyi. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026 (Forthcoming)
"Back to The Future: Naushād Nūrī and the Untold History of Urdu in East Pakistan"Journal of Urdu Studies 6, no. 2 (Forthcoming)
"Review: Moral Atmospheres: Islam and Media in a Pakistani Marketplace (CUP, 2024)"Politics, Religion & Ideology (Published online 2026)
"In Marshall Islands, radiation threatens tradition of handing down stories by song"Los Angeles Times, November 2019 · latimes.com/projects/marshall-islands-radiation-effects-cancer
"A Language in Search of a Nation: The case for Urdu as Pakistan's official language"Herald (Dawn), May 2017 · herald.dawn.com/news/1153737
Towards the Pebbled Shore: Essays by S. Nomanul Haq (editor)Lahore: Folio Books, 2025