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Asif Iqbal

  • Visiting Assistant Professor of English
  • Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Postcolonial World Literature

Areas of Study

Education

  • PhD in English, Michigan State University
  • MA in English, University of Maine
  • BA and MA in English, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh

Biography

Asif Iqbal is the author of Bangladesh in Anglophone and Vernacular Literature: Cultural Imaginings of a Postcolonial Nation (2025) from Routledge. The book, as a study of three historical junctures—the 1947 Partition, the East Pakistan era (1947–1970), and the 1971 War—illuminates Bangladesh’s creation from a comparative framework that includes Anglophone writers, such as, Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie, Kamila Shamsie, and Zia Haider Rahman, as well as Bengali writers Shawkat Ali, Akhteruzzaman Elias, Selina Hossain, and Shahidullah Kaiser. The book, therefore, sets Anglophone literatures in dialogue with Bengali critical, historical, and literary texts to recast the framing of South Asian cross-border entanglements and fractures in literary postcolonial studies. Iqbal has also been published in South Asian Review, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Crossings: A Journal of English Studies and in the Routledge volume Transcultural Humanities in South Asia: Critical Essays on Literature and Culture (2022). His forthcoming publications include a critical introduction to the collaborative translations of “Bangali Mussalmaner Mon” ("The Bengali Muslim Mind") authored by the maverick Bangladeshi intellectual Ahmed Sofa, for Horizontal Translation: An Experiment with South Asian Literature (Bloomsbury Academic’s Literatures, Cultures, Translation Series), and an article on Syed Manzurul Islam’s Song of Our Swampland (2011) in the Routledge volume Nation and Narration: South Asian Literature and the Making and Remaking of National Consciousness.

Spring 2026

Films of the Global Diaspora — ENGL 319

Book

2025

  • Bangladesh in Anglophone and Vernacular Literature: Cultural Imaginings of a Postcolonial Nation (Routledge, 2025)

Articles and Book Chapters

2025

  • or Ummah: Bengali Muslim Literary Conundrum in Anisuzzaman’s Muslim Manas O Bangla Sahitya, 1757-1918.” BRAC University Journal, vol. 12, Dec. 2025, .
  • “The Language Movement in East Pakistan and the Bengali Ekushey Fiction as Postcolonial Resistance.” South Asian Review, 2025,  

2024

  • “The East Pakistan-West Pakistan Entanglement: Gender, Politics and Postcolonial Development in Shawkat Ali’s Dhakkhinayoner Din.”&Բ;South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2024, pp. 1170–1188, .

2022

  • “Transcultural Dilemma in The Good Muslim: An Analysis of Bangladesh Through the Competing Visions of Maya and Sohail.”&Բ;Transcultural Humanities in South Asia: Critical Essays on Literature and Culture, edited by Waseem Anwar and Nosheen Yousaf. Routledge, 2022, pp. 391-402. 

2017

  • “Thinking Beyond Nationalism in South Asia: Reading the Local as Postcolonial in Fault Lines: Stories of 1971.”&Բ;South Asian Review 38.1 (2017): 101-113,

2015

  • Clashing Nationalisms and Corrupting Co-Existence: An Analysis of the Shahbag/Hefajot Frenzy in Bangladesh. Crossings: A Journal of English Studies, 6(1), 78–84.

2014

  •  “Anglophone Interventions: A Post-colonial Analysis of Translating Tagore’s Gitanjali Poem ‘Aji Jharer Rate Tomar Abhisar’ in English.” Crossings: A Journal of English Studies, 4 (2014): 53–60.

Book Review

2024

  • India’s Bangladesh Problem: The Marginalization of Bengali Muslims in Neoliberal Times by Navine Murshid, Cambridge University Press, 2023, pp. 273, $ 110 (Hardback), ISBN 978-1-009-25942-2. South Asian Review, 1–3,

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