Dr. Zehra Kazmi is a Research Associate in the South Asian Studies Unit of the Institute of Ismaili Studies and is a literary scholar specialising in modern South Asian Muslim literature and culture.
Dr. Kazmi is a literary historian of memory and affect, with a background in South Asian literatures, critical Muslim studies, postcolonial theory, and global modernisms. She was recently awarded a PhD in English from the University of St Andrews. Her thesis, which was passed without corrections, is titled, “Indo-Muslim Nostalgia: Memory, Modernity and the Nation in 20th Century South Asian Muslim Writing”. It explores historical memory and nostalgia in South Asian Modernist Muslim writing within the context of sectarian violence and cultural disintegration in the wake of Partition. At the intersections of postcolonial theory, memory studies, affect theory, global modernisms, and decolonial feminist thought, she examines the works of South Asian Muslim and diasporic writers including Qurratulain Hyder, Ahmed Ali, Intizar Husain, Khadija Mastur, Attia Hosain, and M.G. Vassanji, among others.The study offers a rigorous analysis of the interconnections between Anglo-American and South Asian modernisms by tracing the emergence and trajectory of the latter in 20th century Indo-Muslim writing.
Zehra is a co-founder of Tasavvur Collective, a consortium of early career researchers interested in the social, historical, and literary representation of South Asian Muslims. Their highly successful conference, Writing Muslim Women in South Asia, was adapted into a special issue of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (Vol. 47, Issue 4), which she co-edited. Taylor & Francis has commissioned the issue to be republished as a book-length edited volume under Routledge’s Special Issues as Books (SPIB) series. Her academic articles and blogs have appeared in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing , South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Harf: A Journal of South Asian Studies, and the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog. She has published a book chapter in Remembrance, Forgetting and Utterance: Rethinking the Politics of Memory in South Asia (Routledge, 2025) and has also written for broader audiences in The Indian Express, Firstpost, and The Arts Desk, among others.
Education
PhD in English, University of St Andrews (2025)
MPhil in English Studies: Criticism and Culture, University of Cambridge
BA English (Hons), Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi
