Teaching
Courses
Education
- BA in English, St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University,
- MA in Languages and Cultures of South Asia , SOAS, University of London
- Advanced Diploma in Persian language and literature, ICPS, University of Tehran
- PhD, McGill University’s Institute of Islamic Studies
Profile
Sumaira Nawaz is an intellectual and cultural historian of what is often described as the “Muslim World.” Her doctoral thesis, “Muslim Periodicals between Worlds, c. 1876–1919,” explores the vectors of globalization crafted in Persian and Urdu newspapers and magazines circulating across the Ottoman Empire, Qajar Iran, Afghanistan, and South Asia. Rather than presuming a cohesive print sphere, her research foregrounds the conflicts, ambiguities, and fissures that animated periodicals such as Akhtar, Watan, Maʿārif, and Sirāj ul-Aḳhbār and their associated textual productions. The project shows how global press wars served as conduits for editors to position themselves as arbiters of constitutional morality, literary modernity, and objective knowledge-production within their own burgeoning print economies.
Sumaira is a multilingual researcher and works with Urdu, Hindi, and Persian sources. She was a Felix Scholar at SOAS, University of London, where she worked on children’s literature in Urdu and its conception of respectability (sharāfat). During her time at SOAS, her dissertation was on the topic ‘Making the Child Sharīf: Muslim yet not Islamic’.
Research Interests
- Global Intellectual History
- Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies
- Persianate World
- Islamic Studies
- Literary and Media Studies
Publications
- Gvili, Gal and Sumaira Nawaz. 2023. “Relay translation and South–South imaginary: the case of Muhammad Iqbal in China,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 24:5, 862-878.
- “Shibli Numani’s Imagined Community: A 19th-century Travelogue from Northern India challenges Colonial Orientalism” in Himal Southasian.
- “In Other Words: How India became the home of Persian lexicography” in Caravan, Delhi, India’s only narrative journalism magazine
- “How Urdu Travel Writers brought the World Back Home” in Himal Southasian
- “Making the child ‘sharīf’ in Urdu textbooks – Muslim, yet not Islamic” on the MULOSIGE blog as part of a European Research Council funded project on Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies