Fatima Burney,
Assitant Proffesor
at the University
of California Merced.

I'm Fatima.
I was born in Pakistan, grew up in Kuwait, and moved to the United States for college. I live in the beautiful town of Mariposa which is located on the traditional territories of the Southern Sierra Miwuk Tribes.

Though I teach in an English Program, my research is multilingual and considers the relational dynamics between languages and language cultures. I'm especially interested in how the 'rise' of English—from the language of a small island nation to a global lingua franca of historically unprecedented scale—has resulted in anglophone ‘norms and forms’ becoming part of the conceptual infrastructure through which the possibilities of intercultural understanding are filtered.

Against this backdrop, I take a comparative approach to histories of literary form in debates on World Literature. I focus especially on Anglo-Persianate verse culture in the long nineteenth century by which I mean the multilingual exchange between Persianate and Anglophone writing.

My current book project, tentatively titled Lyric Empire: Persiasate Poetry in an Anglophone World, . This work research frames Global Anglophone as a ‘frontier phenomenon’ that was mutable to the diverse contexts in which English has become vernacularized. In other words, where some studies envision Anglophone culture diffusing outwards from centers of imperial power to the geographical ‘margins’, my research highlights the multilingual processes of translation, philology, and colonial language pedagogy that reshaped the Anglophone sphere from the frontier inwards. This comparative framework especially emphasizes the idealized position of borderlands and folk culture in Global Romanticism.

Through a ‘frontier-forward’ approach, I seek to denaturalize the aesthetic and ideological norms of Anglophone literariness that have a present monopoly in the field. My current work particularly considers the hegemony of the Anglophone novel in studies on World Literature and demonstrates how redirecting our attention to marginalized genres can shift our perspectives on this field’s history, its concerns, and its discursive methods.

Over the years, I have published articles and reviews in the Journal of World Literature, Comparative Critical Studies, Philological Encounters, and American Literary Review. I was also the co-editor of a special issue on lyric theory with Comparative Critical Studies that interrogates current debates in lyric theory through the comparative angle of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European translations, imitations, and criticisms of Asian poetry.

You can find your way to some of those article below.

“Persian, Urdu, and English: Triangulating Postcolonial Literary History” in Comparative Literature Studies (September 2024)

“The Veil of Purity: Tropes of Nineteenth-Century Islamic Reform and Ahmad Khan’s naicar” in The Late Persianate World: Transregional Connections and the Question of Language, a special issue of Philological Encounters (October 2023)
Review of Emerson in Iran: American Appropriations of Persian Poetry by Roger Sedarat, American Literary History (October 2021)
Strategies of Sound and Stringing in Ebenezer Pocock’s West-East Verse” The West-Eastern Lyric: A Comparative approach to Lyric History, a special issue of Comparative Critical Studies (June 2020)

Introduction” with Sara Hakeem Grewal. The West-Eastern Lyric: A Comparative approach to Lyric History, a special issue of Comparative Critical Studies (June 2020)

Locating the World in Metaphysical Poetry: The Bardification of Hafiz,” Journal of World Literature 4.2: 149–168. (June 2019)

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