I'm Fatima. I was born in Pakistan, grew up in Kuwait, and moved to the United States for college. I now live in Central California. Here is a short timeline of how my work has evolved over the years, and across the different academic institutions I have been affiliated with.
University of California, Merced
2020 -
I am an assistant professor of English at the University of California Merced. I teach in the Literatures, Languages, and Cultures Department, and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program. I have taught courses on the global romanticsm, environmental humanities, and world poetry.
SOAS
2017 - 2020
From 2017 to 2020, I was a postdoctoral fellow with the Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies project at SOAS, University of London. This was a European Research Council funded project that emphasized located and multilingual approaches to World Literature. You can read about this project's stance on practices of World Literature here. As a fellow, my research activity highlighted the transnational circuits of literary romanticism, particularly between Britain and its colonies.
University of California, Los Angeles
2010 - 2017
I completed my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at UCLA. My doctoral dissertation, “The Inside Outdoors: Returns to Nature in Urdu and Anglophone Poetry,” examined how discources of nature and natural expression influenced the emergence of the romantic lyric as a universal model. It focused especially on the exchange between anglophone and persianate verse cultures in the long nineteenth century.
Wellesley College
2006 - 2010
At Wellesley, I majored in South Asian Studies, minored in Economics, and spent most of my time thinking about poetry. It was here that my mentors encouraged me to write a senior thesis on the Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali. My senior thesis, "In a Wilderness of Longing: Ancient Exile in the Postmodern Ghazal", was the start of a long, still-unresolved obsession with the ghazal and its shifting cultural landscapes of reception.