Contact Information
Fields of Interest
Biography
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. Her article "The Imagist Ghazal: Urdu Modernism and Japan" is forthcoming in Modernism/Modernity.
Prof. Dubrow is currently completing her second book, Formal Disjuncture: Urdu Leftist Modernism in 20th-Century South Asia, which reasseses the work of leftist modernist writers associated with the Progressive Writers’ Movement in India. It argues that these writers, who included Sajjad Zaheer, Rashid Jahan, Manto, Krishan Chander, and Qurratulain Hyder, explored twentieth-century crises of world war, partition, genocide, and decolonization through formal experimentation.
With Preetha Mani (Associate Professor of South Asian Literature, Rutgers University), she co-edited a special issue of Modernism/Modernity titled The Language Challenge: Modernisms in Multilingual South Asia (forthcoming 2026). The issue argues that South Asian modernisms cannot be understood without reference to language politics and processes of vernacularization, yet languages themselves remain porous and unstable.
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 since Spring 2024 has been 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
Research
Selected Research
- Dubrow, Jennifer. "Saadat Hasan Manto and the Poetics of the Urdu Short Story," in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures, edited by Ulka Anjaria and Anjali Nerlekar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024): 618-633. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197647912.013.33. Volume is Winner of the 2025 René Wellek Prize for Best Edited Collection, American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA).
- Dubrow, Jennifer. Review of Megan Robb, Print & the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers, & Urban Life in Colonial India, The American Historical Review 128:3 (2023), pp. 1428-1429.
- Dubrow, Jennifer. Review of Neetu Khanna, The Visceral Logics of Decolonization, Critical Inquiry (2021). https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/jennifer_dubrow_reviews_the_visceral_logics_of_decolonization/
- Julia Chatterjee. "Beyond Frivolity and Fantasy: Explorations of the Occult, Sorcerous, and Divine in Dastan-e Amir Hamza." MA Thesis, University of Washington, 2020.
- Dubrow, Jennifer. "Singing the Revolution: India's Anti-CAA Protests and Faiz's 'Hum Dekhenge.'" Positions: Asia Critique (2020). http://positionswebsite.org/eikon_2dubrow/
- Dubrow, Jennifer. "The Aesthetics of the Fragment: Progressivism and Literary Modernism in the Work of the All-India Progressive Writers' Association." Journal of Postcolonial Writing 55, no. 5 (2019): 589-601. DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2019.1635846.
- Dubrow, Jennifer. Cosmopolitan Dreams: The Making of Modern Urdu Literary Culture in Colonial South Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2018. Print.
- Dubrow, Jennifer. "Sharafat and Bhal Mānsī: a new perspective on respectability in Fasana-e Azad." South Asian History and Culture 9, no. 2 (2018): 181-193. DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2018.1446796
- Dubrow, Jennifer. Cosmopolitan Dreams: The Making of Modern Urdu Literary Culture in Colonial South Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2018 (forthcoming).
- Dubrow, Jennifer. "Serial Fictions: Urdu Print Culture and the Novel in Colonial South Asia." Indian Economic and Social History Review 54, no. 4 (2017): 403-422.
- Dubrow, Jennifer. "A Space for Debate: Fashioning the Urdu Novel in Colonial India." Comparative Literature Studies 53.2 (2016): 289-311.
- Dubrow, Jennifer. "Khwaja Haydar Ali Atish." Encyclopaedia of Islam, Three. Leiden: Brill, 2015. 32-33. Print.
- Jennifer Dubrow, trans. "A Tarji'-band from the Avadh Panch, 1880." 2008.
- Jennifer Dubrow, trans. An Excerpt from Fasana-e Azad by Ratan Nath Dar 'Sarshar' (1846-1902). 2008.
- Dubrow, Jennifer. "The Imagist Ghazal: Urdu Modernism and Japan." Modernism/Modernity, forthcoming.
- Dubrow, Jennifer, and Preetha Mani, eds. The Language Challenge: Modernisms in Multilingual South Asia. Modernism/Modernity, special issue, forthcoming.