Zahra Sabri

Zahra Sabri is Lecturer in 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 Mughal History and the influence of the Persianate on Indo-Muslim languages, cultures, and traditions of learning, as well as on politics of identity centred around Urdu in South Asia. 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 is the curator of Koozah—an anthology of Urdu short stories by new and little-known Pakistani writers (OUP, 2015). She contributes articles to Pakistan’s national press on diverse political and educational issues and has also worked as a journalist for the Herald magazine (Dawn), winning the Zubeida Mustafa Award for Journalistic Excellence (2013).