Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre at LUMS

I am primarily a literary historian, but also a dedicated comparatist and close reader.  I was trained in Comparative Literature at UCLA by Professor Aamir Mufti. I completed my undergraduate degree at Princeton University, where I majored in Comparative Literature and received a minor in European Cultural Studies. My first book, Who is a Muslim? Orientalism and Literary Populisms (Fordham University Press, 2021), argues for a renewed interrogation of the European scholarly discipline and cultural practice, orientalism, and its influence on modern vernacular literatures. It shows how the Urdu literary canon, particularly prose, is formed around the orientalist question of who constitutes a Muslim in colonial and later, postcolonial, South Asia. The book spans some three centuries and takes its archive from both England and North-India in an effort to highlight how the Urdu literary formation becomes the authority-designate on questions of piety, national identity, and citizenship. My second project revisits both my undergraduate studies in literature at Princeton and engages with my present teaching to think through the possibilities contained in canonical Western texts once they are dislocated from the Euro-American academy. I teach the introductory core for the Comparative Literature and Creative Arts (CLCA) program along with my colleague Fatima Fayyaz, as well as the advanced core in methodology.