Jennifer Dubrow (She/her)

Prof. Jennifer Dubrow is Associate Professor of Urdu, with an Adjunct Faculty appointment in English, and affiliate appointments in the Near and Middle Eastern Studies Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program, Textual and Digital Studies, and the South Asian Studies Program in the Jackson School of International Studies. She is the author of Cosmopolitan Dreams: The Making of Modern Urdu Literary Culture in Colonial South Asia (University of Hawai'i Press, 2018; Permanent Black, 2019), which argued that the arrival of affordable print technology enabled the formation of an Urdu cosmopolis in colonial South Asia. The book has been reviewed in Journal of Asian Studies, South Asian History and Culture, Journal of Urdu Studies, H-net, Dawn, India Today, and other places.

Her research articles on 19th- and 20th-century Urdu literature have been published in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures, Positions: asia critique, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, South Asian History and Culture, Indian Economic and Social History Review, and Comparative Literature Studies. A co-edited (with Preetha Mani) special issue on Multilingual Modernisms in South Asia is forthcoming with Modernism/Modernity.

Prof. Dubrow's current research is on the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the work of Progressive writers in Urdu from the 1930s to the 1960s. She is writing her second book, Partitioned Forms: Progressivism and Urdu Modernism in 20th-Century South Asia, which covers the work of Saadat Hasan Manto and Krishan Chander among others. Research for this book has been supported by grants from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, and Friends of the UW-Madison Libraries.

Prof. Dubrow's teaching focuses on modern Hindi and Urdu literatures; South Asian modernisms; and the history of the book and print culture in South Asia. She regularly teaches S ASIA 206: Modern Literature of South Asia, courses on 3rd year/4th year Hindi/Urdu, Novel and Short Story, and in Spring 2024 will be teaching a new undergraduate course on "Partition Literature and Film." Her graduate seminars are: S ASIA 585, Radical Fictions: Literary Modernisms in South Asia, and ASIAN 541, The History of the Book in South Asia.

Read my 2020 piece on Urdu poetry and the anti-CAA protests, republished in Dawn

Prof. Dubrow interviewed about her book in Urdu, Dhamaal TV