Kathmandu comprises an intricate collection of spaces, histories, conflicts, and imaginaries. Long a site of contestation, aspiration, and external projection, the city encompasses a bundle of seeming contradictions: ancient and modern, traditional and cosmopolitan, ever-changing and yet consistently itself. In the twenty-first century, research about contemporary Kathmandu-and the Kathmandu Valley more broadly-has proliferated, owing to transformations in the city itself as well as to shifts within the social sciences.