Zahra Sabri

Zahra Sabri teaches Indo-Islamic History and Urdu Literature at the Department of Social Sciences and Liberal Arts at the IBA, Karachi. She received her MA degree from the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University in the city of New York. She has taught History and Urdu Literature at McGill University, Canada, the Aga Khan University, Pakistan, and the University of Karachi’s Pakistan Study Centre. Her research focuses on the influence of the Persianate on Indo-Muslim languages, cultures, and traditions of learning, as well as politics of identity centred around Urdu in South Asia. Her most recent academic publication is an article on the Mughal poet Mir Taqi Mir’s Persian hagiographical/historiographical writing (The Medieval History Journal, 2015). She is the compiler/editor of “Koozah”—an anthology of Urdu short stories by new and little-known Pakistani writers (Oxford University Press, 2015). She is a literary translator, and has translated folk and classical poetry from almost a dozen Pakistani languages for eleven seasons of the popular music programme Coke Studio, Pakistan. She has also worked as a journalist for the ‘Herald’ magazine, winning the Zubeida Mustafa Award for Journalistic Excellence (2013). She has contributed articles to Pakistan’s national press on diverse political and educational issues over the years, and her journalistic writings are archived at ˂https://zsabree.wordpress.com/˃