Please join the Department of Comparative Literature on Tuesday, January 14th from 5:30 – 7:00 p.m. for a lecture from Professor Maryam Wasif Khan of the Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Lahore University of Management Sciences entitled, “‘Ten Tongues and Ten Mouths’: Reading the Iliad in post-9/11 Pakistan.” This event is part of “UCLA Comparative Literature in the World,” a series of talks from recent department graduates sponsored by the Division of Humanities. The lecture will take place at Kaplan Hall 348 and a light reception will follow. Please RSVP for the event at this link.

Maryam Wasif Khan is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan. She received her doctoral degree in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles under the supervision of Professor Aamir Mufti. She also holds an A.B. in Comparative Literature (summa cum laude) from Princeton University. Maryam’s research and teaching interests include British orientalism, Muslim reform, world literature, Urdu serial plays and popular narratives. Her work has appeared in Modern Fiction Studies (MFS), Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History (MLQ) and PMLA. Her first book, Who Is a Muslim? Orientalism and Literary Populisms, is to be published by Fordham University Press. This work argues against conventional methods of writing literary history for colonial vernaculars such as Urdu or Hindi. Suggesting that Urdu prose fiction from the moment of its inception at Fort William College is coded with certain Orientalist ideals of Muslim identity, the project demonstrates how this identity, in the contemporary moment, manifests as a powerful religio-populist literary impulse. A second project is envisioned as a series of essays and contemplations on the possibilities contained in the act of reading foundational European texts outside of the Academy.