Nazia Akhtar


Assistant Professor
Ph.D (University of Western Ontario, Canada)
Research Areas: Literature and History of Hyderabad; Partition Studies; women's writings; comparative literature
Email: nazia.akhtar@iiit.ac.in

I have an MA and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Western Ontario (now Western University). As a literary scholar, my primary expertise and interest consist of the literature and culture of twentieth-century Hyderabad and the Deccan region. I have been conducting research on a long tradition of Hyderabadi women’s writing in Urdu since 2015 and have recently published a book on this subject. Bibi’s Room: Hyderabadi Women and Twentieth-Century Urdu Prose (Orient BlackSwan and New India Foundation, 2022) contains literary translations from Urdu into English as well as biographies and literary analysis pertaining to three Hyderabadi women who wrote in Urdu. My current projects include more translations of literary texts (fiction and non-fiction) from Urdu into English as well as research into the Urdu literary circles of Hyderabad.

I also have expertise in Russian language and literature and have recently returned to teaching courses in nineteenth-century Russian Literature after a long hiatus.

Select Publications

  • [Article] “Between Sadhu and Darvesh: Storytelling and Social Reform in Sughra Humayun Mirza’s Mohini (1929),” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (special issue, forthcoming).
  • [Article] “Brick, Verse, Echo: Partition and the Decline of Urdu Poetry in Jeelani Bano’s Aiwan–e–Ghazal (1976),” Regional Perspectives on India’s Partition: Shifting the Vantage Points. Eds. Anjali Roy and Nandi Bhatia. Routledge, 2023. 41-54.
  • [Article] “The Turns My Life has Taken”: Gender, Narrative, and Self-Hood in Bilquis Jehan Khan’s A Song of Hyderabad (2010),” Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics 45.3 (Autumn 2022), 81-91.
  • [Book] Bibi’s Room: Hyderabadi Women and Twentieth-Century Urdu Prose, Orient Blackswan and New India Foundation, 2022.
  • [Article] “Opaque Fragment, Clear Narrative: Silence and Testimony in Huma R. Kidwai’s The Hussaini Alam House (2012).” Displacement and Citizenship: Histories and Memories of Exclusion. Eds. Vijaya Rao et al. Tulika, 2020. 175-193.

Projects

  • Manuscript (Single-Author)

    My current literary translation project consists of producing a book-length manuscript titled The Deccan Sun: Essays and Stories by Zeenath Sajida (1924-2009).

  • Digital Repository and Archive

    I am the Principal Investigator for a project consisting of digitizing and creating an online, open-source resource and repository of texts associated with the literature and culture of twentieth-century Hyderabad.

Research Students

Research Supervision Interests

  • Literary depictions of the Long Partition, esp. in the context of neglected and marginalised regions and geographies
  • Life-Writing and Auto/Biography
  • Digital Archiving and Preservation of Literary Texts
  • Literary translation, both by human translators as well as automated systems, for the following language pairs: Urdu/Hindi-English, Russian-English, Russian-Urdu/Hindi
  • Literary representations of the ethnic and racial margins of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union
  • Natural Language Processing in the domain of creative writing
  • Canadian Writing, particularly texts and contexts associated with BIPOC authors