Institute, Harvard University. She was the Syed Babar Ali Fellow for Spring 2023, where she initiated research and translation projects that continue to share her current work on Indo-Persian literary and visual cultures.
Her research brings together critical theory, storytelling, translation, religion, visual culture, wonder, and the uncanny, with a particular focus on Indo-Persian narrative traditions and their afterlives in contemporary literary and cultural thought. Drawing extensively on Urdu-language
scholarship, her work seeks to develop theoretical approaches grounded in South Asian intellectual and literary traditions while engaging broader debates in literary and cultural theory.
Zia received her PhD from the University of Sussex in 2017. Her doctoral dissertation, the first book-length study of the English translation of the Indo-Persian classic Dastan-e Amir Hamza, examined the intersections of religious orientations, storytelling, and the uncanny. By bringing previously untranslated Urdu scholarship into conversation with contemporary theory, the study proposed new ways of understanding a major indigenous storytelling tradition that has often been interpreted through Anglophone critical frameworks.
During her fellowship at the Mittal Institute, she began an English translation of the opening volume of Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s landmark study of the forty-six-volume Dastan-e Amir Hamza, Sahiri, Shahi, Sahibqirani: Dastan-e Amir Hamza ka Mutalea (Sorcery, Kingship, Lordship of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction: A Critical Study of The Adventures of Amir Hamza).
As a Research Affiliate, she continues this translation while also pursuing research on the Mughal Hamzanama paintings under the mentorship of Professor Jinah Kim. Before entering academia, Zia worked for five years at Pakistan’s first English-language news channel, DawnNews, where she served as Assignment Editor for the Punjab region and reported on major social and political issues. She holds master’s degrees in English Language and Literature from the University of the Punjab and in Critical Theory from the University of Sussex.
Her scholarship has appeared in Oxford Literary Review, South Asian Review, Journal for the Fantastic in the Arts, Marvels & Tales, and Journal of Scholarly Publishing, and Textual Practice.
She is also a contributor to Columbia University’s Teaching World Epics project, directed by Professor Jo Ann Cavallo. She is currently completing her monograph, Dastan-e Amir Hamza: Religious Orientations, Storytelling, and the Uncanny, under contract with Routledge’s Global Genre Fiction series, and continues to write and speak publicly on folklore, religion, gender, and culture. Read her interview with the Mittal Newsletter here.
