Asif Iqbal

Biography

Asif Iqbal is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Postcolonial World Literature at Oberlin College. His area of research includes the Global Anglophone novel, postcolonial and diasporic literatures, world literature and the Global South. His book manuscript Bangladesh in Anglophone and Vernacular Literature: Cultural Imaginings of a Postcolonial Nation is a comparative and interdisciplinary study of a range of South Asian and postcolonial literatures tracing the formation of Bangladesh in three distinct historical junctures: the Bengali Muslim demand for Pakistan before 1947, the political evolution of East Pakistan from 1947 to 1971, and the traumatic 1971 war. He has published an essay in South Asian Review (2017), and he has another essay published in the volume Transcultural Humanities in South Asia: Critical Essays on Literature and Culture (2022). His forthcoming articles include “A Bihari Among the Bengalis: Persecution of Non-Bengali Muslims during the Liberation War of 1971 in Syed Manzurul Islam’s Song of Our Swampland,” “The Language Movement in East Pakistan and the Bengali Ekushey Fiction as Postcolonial Resistance,” and “The East Pakistan–West Pakistan Entanglement: Gender, Politics and Postcolonial Development in Shawkat Ali’s Dhakkhinayoner Din.” He was a selected participant in the British Academy Writing Workshop titled “Pakistan to Bangladesh, 1947–71.” Dr. Iqbal is also the recipient of the Bangabandhu Sheikh Rahman Research Award administered by the Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies at UC Berkeley.