Sara Kazmi is Assistant Professor of English with affiliations in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. She is a scholar and translator whose work takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of anticolonial, left, and oppositional literary production in the global south. Sara focuses on the Panjab region, and more broadly, on South Asia and South Asian diasporas, combining methods in literary studies, performance, and history to examine how marginal and vernacular writing engages planetary debates around decolonization, Marxism, and revolutionary transformation.
Sara is currently working on a book tentatively titled Anti-Border Poetics: Literary Dissent and Popular Tradition in India/Pakistan. The monograph will argue that left-wing and oppositional Panjabi writers from 1960s and 1970s India and Pakistan critiqued and resisted the internal exclusions and external borders that govern South Asia through a reflexive engagement with oral and performative regional tradition. Drawing on close reading, archival research, interviews, ethnography, and translation, the book will trace genealogical links across historical periods, religious communities, and national contexts, between texts both oral and textual, to reveal how the two Panjabs, Indian and Pakistani, resist the bordering logics of post-colonial nation-states.
Sara is also part of the Revolutionary Papers collective, which is a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th century periodicals of left, anti-imperial, and anticolonial critical production. As part of her work with the collective, she has co-edited (with Hana Morgenstern) a series of ‘digital teaching tools’ for the Special Issue on Revolutionary Papers for the Radical History Review (Forthcoming, Oct 2024). In addition to her work as a scholar, she is a performer and student of Indian classical music. She blends ragas with folk tunes in renditions of protest music from South Asia, some of which are archived at mein.beqaid (I, Uncaged). Sara also sits on the editorial committee for Jamhoor, a critical left media organization that amplifies marginalized and progressive voices from South Asia.
Prior to joining the University of Pennsylvania, Sara Kazmi was a Postdoctoral Fellow at LUMS University in Lahore, Pakistan. She received a PhD in Criticism and Culture at the Department of English, University of Cambridge, an MA in South Asian History at SOAS, London, and a B.A. (Hons) in Humanities from LUMS University.
African American and Ethnic American Literatures
Postcolonial Literature and Global Anglophone
spring 2025
ENGL 0341.301 Imperials v. Rebels (First Year Seminar)
ENGL 2190.401 The Indian English Novel: From Colony to Nation
fall 2024
ENGL 1190.401 Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures
ENGL 7760.401 Partition in South Asia
spring 2024
ENGL 1190.401 Introduction to Postcolonial Literature canceled
"The Periodical as Political Educator: Anticolonial Print and Digital Humanities in the Classroom and Beyond" section co-editor. Radical History Review (2024)
"Radical Re-tellings of Hir: Gender and the Politics of Voice in Postcolonial Punjabi Poetry" South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (2019)
"Of Subalterns and Sammi Trees: Echoes of Ghadar in the Punjabi Literary Movement" Journal of Socialist Studies (2018)
"The Marxist Punjabi Movement: Language and Literary Radicalism in Pakistan" South Asia Chronicle/ Südasien-Chronik (2018)