Jennifer Dubrow (She/her)

Jennifer Dubrow specializes in Urdu literature from the 19th and 20th centuries. Her research combines literary and book historical scholarship to offer a materially grounded account of modern Urdu literature. Her research interests include Urdu literary modernism, leftist writing, print culture, periodical studies, satire, readership, and literary publics.

Her first book, Cosmopolitan Dreams: The Making of Modern Urdu Literary Culture in Colonial South Asia (University of Hawai'i Press, 2018; Permanent Black, 2019), argued that the arrival of affordable print technology enabled the formation of an Urdu cosmopolis in colonial South Asia. By focusing on Urdu-language novels, satire, and the periodicals Avadh Akhbar and Avadh Punch, Dubrow shows how readers and writers claimed a shared space and affiliation on the basis of language, rather than religion, region, caste, or class. This formation, which she terms the Urdu cosmopolis, soon fractured and risked being broken by the forces of nationalism and communalism.

She is currently completing a book manuscript, Formal Disjuncture: Urdu Leftist Modernism in 20th-Century South Asia, on the relationship between aesthetics and politics in Urdu literature from the 1930s to the 1950s. The book identifies a leftist modernist literary practice in Urdu, in which avant-garde literary techniques were joined to a project of awakening the masses toward a more equitable future. It covers the work of well-known writers Sajjad Zaheer, Rashid Jahan, Saadat Hasan Manto, Krishan Chander, and Qurratulain Hyder, and uses an intermedial approach to consider literary modernism in the light of cinema and radio.

She has co-edited a special issue of the journal Modernism/Modernity titled The Language Challenge: Modernisms in Multilingual South Asia (forthcoming November 2025). Co-edited with Preetha Mani, 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. The issue includes her article on how Urdu modernist writers fostered an aesthetic relationship with Japan, different from Tagore’s interests in pan-Asianism, to craft a modernist poetics in the 1930s.

Dubrow enjoys teaching both introductory and advanced undergraduate courses on South Asian literatures (in translation), and graduate seminars on South Asian modernisms, the history of the book in South Asia, and Urdu literature.