Sara Kazmi

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.