Zehra Kazmi has recently completed her PhD from the School of English, where she was supervised by Dr. Anindya Raychaudhuri. She passed her viva in March 2025 (with only typographical corrections) and is currently working four different roles across the University of St Andrews. She is a Graduate Teaching Assistant with the School of English, a STEP Coach for the International Education and Lifelong Learning Institute (IELLI), a Research Assistant at the Cultural Indentity and Memory Studies (CIMS) Institute and an Assistant Warden as a part of the Wardennial Service run by Student Services.

Her doctoral thesis, 'Indo-Muslim Nostalgia: Memory, Modernity and the Nation', explores 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 examined 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 Handsel Scholarship and the Gilchrist Individual Grant. Her academic work has been published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, South Asia: A Journal of South Asian Studies and Journal of the History of Ideas Blog. She has also written for broader audience in The Indian Express, Homegrown, Firstpost and The Arts Desk.

Zehra holds an MPhil in English Studies: Criticism and Culture at the University of Cambridge and did her undergraduate studies at Lady Shri Ram College for Women, Delhi University. Prior to her arrival at St Andrews, she worked as a Teaching Fellow at Ashoka University, Delhi for two years. She is a co-founder of Tasavvur Collective, a consortium of early career researchers interested in the social, historical and literary representation of South Asian Muslims. The Collective's highly successful conference 'Writing Muslim Women in South Asia' was adapted into a special issue (vol 47, issue 4) for South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, which she co-edited.

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.