16/08/2026
The Department of English and Humanities is holding a seminar on "Women in Politics and Literature: Contributions of Jahanara Shahnawaz and Shaista Ikramullah" by Dr. Md. Mahmudul Hasan, Professor of Global Literature, International Islamic University
Malaysia, and Editor-in-Chief, Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature.
The seminar will be held on Tuesday, August 18, 2026 at 11.00 am in PD205, ULAB Main Campus, and is open to all.
ABSTRACT
Muslim women are generally viewed as controlled by and dependent on men of their families and societies. Their voices are unheard and excluded from culture, as they are largely represented by men of their own kind and opinions, or by commentators whose ideas and ways of thinking do not necessarily resonate with their own. In South Asian literary scholarship, Muslim women writers are doubly marginalised—because of their gender and religion—partly due to the preponderance of research focus on their Hindu counterparts. Consequently, South Asian Muslim women writers are understudied and much of their work underexplored in literary discussion. The limited amount of academic research devoted to them is not commensurate with the richness of their literary heritage. Therefore, the journey of researchers engaging with South Asian Muslim women’s writing is often filled with new experiences, surprises, discoveries, and turning points. Against this backdrop, I shall discuss my research on the work of Jahanara Shahnawaz and Shaista Ikramullah and evaluate their contributions to South Asian politics and culture. Their political participation began during the colonial period and continued in the post-Partition era. They were among those South Asian women who traversed the intersection between political activism and literary production and chronicled their experiences for future generations.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Dr Md. Mahmudul Hasan is a professor of global literature at International Islamic University Malaysia and the Editor-in-Chief of the Scopus- and Web of Science-indexed journal Asiatic (Q2). In 2007-2010, he taught at the University of Dhaka where he had studied English literature in the 1990s. For his doctoral research in feminist comparative literature at the University of Portsmouth, he studied the feminist work of Begum Rokeya, Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, Attia Hosain, and Monica Ali. In 2009-2010, Dr Hasan did a postdoctoral fellowship on South Asian Muslim feminism at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. His research has appeared in publications by the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, Brill, IIIT, IIUM, Johns Hopkins University, Orient BlackSwan, Routledge, SAGE, University of Florida, University Press Limited, Wiley-Blackwell, and other presses.
He spoke at academic events in Australia, Canada, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Maldives, Malta, Oman, the UK, the USA, and other countries. Among the books he has coedited and contributed to are Bangladeshi Literature in English: Critical Essays and Interviews (2024), Displaced & Forgotten: Memoirs of Refugees (2017), and A Feminist Foremother: Critical Essays on Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (2017).
See you there!
