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. 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