Dr. Sabeena Shaikh

Sabeena Shaikh is a scholar, dancer, and community organizer working at the intersection of gender, performance, and Urdu literary history. She is drawn to the voices that South Asian literary history has too often pushed to its margins, and to the embodied traditions–– dance, recitation, song–– through which those voices have survived.

Her current project is a translation and critical study of the late eighteenth-century kulliyat (collected works) of Lutf un-Nisa “Imtiyaz,” (1733?-?). The manuscript is one of the earliest surviving Urdu manuscripts attributed to a woman author, and Sabeena’s work situates it within the literary and social worlds of the Deccan, recovering a foundational and largely unread chapter in the history of women’s authorship in Urdu.

Sabeena’s broader research interests include gender and performance; Urdu poetry and women’s authorship and voice; and the performed traditions of Urdu poetry, including ghazal and qawwali. She works across Islamic Studies, Literary and Media Studies, the Persianate world, and Manuscript Studies with a research and teaching interest in language pedagogy. Her research languages are Hindi, Urdu, Braj Bhasha, and Persian and her geographic focus spans South Asia and Central Asia.

Her work has been published in Arc: Journal of the School of Religious Studies, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, with forthcoming work in Modern Asian Studies. She has presented at the Association for Asian Studies, the Middle East Studies Association, the Annual Conference on South Asia, the American Comparative Literature Association, the European Conference on South Asian Studies, the Great Lakes Adiban Society, and the Braj and Beyond Hindavi Reading Workshop among many additional regional conferences.

Sabeena is the former Editor-in-Chief of Harf: A Journal for South Asian Studies. She has organized the yearly Islamic Poetry Nights in collaboration with the Islamic Studies Library (Montreal) and a multi-day Islamic Paleography & Codicology Workshop, and remains committed to community building in practice, bringing scholarship, performance, and public life into conversation, and connecting academic work to activism.

• South Asian Languages and Literature
• Literary and Media Studies
• Manuscript Studies
• Religion and Religious Studies
• Asian Cultural Studies
• Diasporic Studies