Saba Pirzadeh is associate professor of English and environmental humanities. A Fulbright fellowship recipient, she completed her PhD in English and graduate certificate in Women and Gender Studies from Purdue University. She works in the areas of environmental humanities and postcolonial studies, with a particular focus on literary representation of anthropocentric violence, climate crisis, petroculture, hydropolitics, interspecies relationality and socioecological justice. Saba helped to develop and implement the University's environmental studies minor. Her secondary research interests include popular culture and its articulation of the ideological and material realities of the postcolonial experience. Her work has received support from the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (Munich) and Bucknell Humanities Center (Pennsylvania). Saba is currently part of "The Next Monsoon: Climate Change and Contemporary Cultural Production in South Asia", an NEH research project led by Ifthikar Dadi (Cornell University) and Sonal Khullar (University of Pennsylvania). She is also serving as an editorial board member of South Asia Research.
Peer-reviewed publications:
- “Partition Migration and Urbicide in Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-Candy Man.” Art and Architecture of Migration and Discrimination: Turkey, Pakistan, and their European Diasporas. Edited by Esra Akcan and Iftikhar Dadi. London: Routledge, 2023.
- Saba Pirzadeh and Tehmina Pirzada. “Cinematic Empire and Nostalgia in Viceroy’s House and Victoria and Abdul.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Jan. 2022, doi:10.1177/00219894211066444.
- “Popular Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene. Ed. John Parham. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2021.
- “Neoliberal Extraction and Aquatic Resistance in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing.
https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2021.1886975 - "Postcolonial Development, Socio-ecological Degradation and Slow Violence in Pakistani Fiction.” Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication. Ed. Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan and Vidya Sarveswaran. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2019.
- “Topographies of Fear: War and Environmental Othering in Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator and Nadeem Aslam’s The Blind Man’s Garden.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 21.6 (2019): 892-907. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2018.1558090
- Saba Pirzadeh and Tehmina Pirzada. “Pakistani Popular Music: A Call to Reform in the Public Sphere.” South Asian Popular Culture 17.2 (2019): 197-211.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2018.1512702 - Saba Pirzadeh and Arielle McKee. “Arthurian Eco-conquest in Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, and Laȝamon.” Parergon 34.1 (2017): 1-24. doi:10.1353/pgn.2017.0000.
- “Children of Ravaged Worlds: Exploring Environmentalism in Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker and Cameron Stracher's The Water Wars.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 22.2 (2015): 203-221. Oxford University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isu143 - “Persecution vs. Protection: Examining the Pernicious Politics of Environmental Conservation in The Hungry Tide.” South Asian Review 36.2 (2015): 107-120.
https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2015.11933020