Asif Iqbal

Biography

Asif Iqbal is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Oberlin College, Ohio, USA. His area of research includes the Global Anglophone novel, postcolonial and diasporic literatures, world literature and the Global South. His book project Two Partitions: Anglophone & Vernacular Cultural Imaginings of Postcolonial Bangladesh is a comparative and interdisciplinary study of a range of South Asian and diasporic literatures tracing the formation of Bangladesh through the partitions of 1947 and 1971. 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 “Between Memories of Bangladesh and the Anglo-American Lived Experience: Diasporic Travails in Bangladeshi Anglophone Short Stories” in the Routledge edited volume titled Palimpsests of Identity and Memory: Contemporary Perspectives on South Asian Diaspora Literatures, and “A Bihari Among the Bengalis in the Liberation War Anglophone Novel The Song of Our Swampland.” As a participant in the British Academy sponsored writing workshop Pakistan to Bangladesh, 1947–70, Dr. Iqbal has completed research on a major Bengali trilogy Shawkat Ali’s Dhakkhinayoner Din. His article, titled “The East Pakistan–West Pakistan Entanglement: Gender, Politics, and Postcolonial Development in Shawkat Ali’s Dhakkhinayoner Din,” is forthcoming. Recently, Dr. Iqbal has been awarded the Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Research Award administered by the Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies at UC Berkeley.