Zehra Kazmi

Zehra Kazmi is a PhD candidate at the School of English, where she is supervised by Dr. Anindya Raychaudhuri. For her doctoral thesis, she is studying historical memory and nostalgia in South Asian Muslim writing, in the context of sectarian violence and cultural disintegration in contemporary India. At the intersections of postcolonial theory, memory studies, affect theory, global modernisms and decolonial feminist thinking, her project examines the works of South Asian Muslim writers like Qurratulain Hyder, Ahmed Ali, Intizar Husain, Khadija Mastur, and Attia Hosain, among others. Zehra is a recipient of the School of English PhD Scholarship and works as an Assistant Warden at David Russell Apartments and Fife Park. 

Zehra holds a BA (Hons) in English from Lady Shri Ram College for Women at Delhi University, after which she went to pursue an MPhil in English Studies: Criticism and Culture at the University of Cambridge. Prior to her arrival at St Andrews, she worked as a Teaching Fellow at Ashoka University, Delhi for two years. She is the co-founder of Tasavvur Collective, a consortium of early career researchers interested in the social, historical and literary representation of South Asian Muslims.

In addition to postcolonial writing and South Asian culture, Zehra harbours a keen interest in multiple fields within literary and cultural studies like, film theory; affect; digital cultures; heritage studies; material culture and object narratives; feminist theory; nature writing, and oral history. Presently, she is also trying to pass off her penchant for cringe content on the internet and bad TV as healthy academic curiosity.