I am primarily a literary historian, but also a dedicated comparatist and close reader. I was trained in Comparative Literature at UCLA by Professor Aamir Mufti. I completed my undergraduate degree at Princeton University, where I majored in Comparative Literature and received a minor in European Cultural Studies. My first book, Who is a Muslim? Orientalism and Literary Populisms (Fordham University Press, 2021), argues for a renewed interrogation of the European scholarly discipline and cultural practice, orientalism, and its influence on modern vernacular literatures. It shows how the Urdu literary canon, particularly prose, is formed around the orientalist question of who constitutes a Muslim in colonial and later, postcolonial, South Asia. The book spans some three centuries and takes its archive from both England and North-India in an effort to highlight how the Urdu literary formation becomes the authority-designate on questions of piety, national identity, and citizenship. My second project revisits both my undergraduate studies in literature at Princeton and engages with my present teaching to think through the possibilities contained in canonical Western texts once they are dislocated from the Euro-American academy. I am also a mother to two young children and an avid cook and baker.
Khan, M. (2017). "Hybridity in the Vernacular: Muslim Reform and Resistance". PMLA, 132 (1), 171-178, doi:10.1632/pmla.2017.132.1.171.
Khan, M. (2017). "The Oriental tale and the transformation of North-Indian Prose Fiction". MLQ: A Journal of Literary History, 78 (1), 27-50, doi:10.1215/00267929-3699769.
Khan, M. (2016). "Enlightenment Orientalism to Modernist Orientalism: The Archives of Forster's Passage to India". Modern Fiction Studies, 62 (2), 217-235, doi:10.1353/mfs.2016.0027.
Khan, M. (2019). The Other Woman: Mirza Hadi Rusva's Umrao Jan Ada and the Politics of Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century India, Published. The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature, Wiley and Sons.
Khan, M. (2021). Who Is a Muslim?: Orientalism and Literary Populisms, Fordham University Press.
Khan, M. (2016). "The Accidental Anglophone Novel: Major Narrative Forms in Contemporary Pakistan" at "The Novel in or against World Literature". Society for Novel Studies Bi-Annual Conference, Pittsburgh, United States of America.
Khan, M. (2015). "The Oriental tale in the Orient: Imperial Pedagogy and the Transformation of Narrative". International Congress for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Khan, M. (2015). "Original Letters from India: Eliza Fay and the English Picaresque". International Congress for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Khan, M. (2013). "Orientalism's Tale: Nation and Empire in eighteenth-century England". Modern Language Association, Annual Convention, Boston, United States of America.
Khan, M. (2012). "The Possibilities of Secular criticism in contemporary Pakistani film and pop music". American Institute of Pakistan Studies, "Is there a Pakistani Public", Lahore, Pakistan.
Khan, M. (2010). "British Orientalism, the dastan and the inscription of identity on modern Urdu". South Asian Literary Association, Los Angeles, United States of America.
Khan, M. (2009). "Naavel, not Novel: Urdu's Crisis of Genre". American Comparative Literature Association, Cambridge, United States of America.