Ather Zia, PhD, is a political anthropologist, poet, short fiction writer, and columnist. She is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Gender Studies at the University of Northern Colorado, Greeley. Her scholarship and creative work center on Kashmir, with a particular focus on settler colonialism, decolonial knowledge, and the intimate and political dimensions of military occupation, memory, resistance, and survival.

She is the author of Resisting Disappearances: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir (University of Washington Press, 2019; Zubaan Books South Asia edition, 2020), an award winning book that received the 2020 Gloria Anzaldúa Honorable Mention, the 2021 Public Anthropologist Award, the 2021 Advocate of the Year Award, and an honorable mention for the 2021 Rosaldo Book Prize. In 2021, she was featured in The Femilist, which recognized one hundred women from the Global South working on critical global issues.

Ather is the coeditor of Can You Hear Kashmiri Women Speak? (Women Unlimited, 2020), Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), and A Desolation Called Peace (HarperCollins, 2019). She has also coedited Kashmir and Palestine (Identities, Taylor & Francis, 2020) and Kashmiri Futures (English Language Notes, Duke University Press, 2023).
She is the author of the poetry collections The Frame and In Kashmir: Writing Under Occupation (Agitate Collective, 2025). Her ethnographic poetry on Kashmir has been recognized by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology.

She is the foundereditor of Kashmir Lit, creator of Mulakaat Ganimat, a multimedia conversation series on Kashmiri languages, literatures, and cultural worlds, cofounder of the Critical Kashmir Studies Collective, former coeditor of Cultural Anthropology (2022–2025), and currently serves as Associate Editor of the Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures.