Biography
Zarena Aslami’s research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century British literature and culture. Special areas of interest include empire, history and theory of the novel, feminism, psychoanalysis, and disability studies. She is the author of The Dream Life of Citizens: Late Victorian Novels and the Fantasy of the State (Fordham University Press, 2012), which explores how novels dramatized the feelings and fantasies of a liberal culture that was increasingly optimistic, as well as anxious, about the state’s capacity to “step in” and help its citizens achieve the good life. Her current book project, Sovereign Anxieties: Victorian Afghanistan and the Literatures of Empire, continues this line of inquiry, examining the affective content of political forms in a transnational context. Broadly, a study of the British Empire, Sovereign Anxieties focuses on the case of Afghanistan, tracking how and why nineteenth-century British discourse cast it as vague and inassimilable. Her articles have appeared in Victorian Studies and Novel: A Forum on Fiction. Before joining the Department of English at MSU, she was a Collegiate Assistant Professor and Harper Postdoctorate Fellow at the University of Chicago.
Ph.D., English, The University of Chicago
M.A., English, The University of Chicago
B.A., Duke University
Works
Co-editor with Timothy Watson, “Infrastructure,” special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 52, no. 3, Summer 2024.
“Race and Empire,” Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1890s, edited by Dustin Friedman and Kristin Mahoney, Cambridge University Press, 2023, pp. 21 – 40.
“Buffer Zones: Notes on Afghanistan, Race, and Empire,” “Undisciplining Victorian Studies,” special issue of Victorian Studies, vol. 62, no. 3, pp. 433 – 45.
“’We cannot conquer it—we cannot leave it alone’: Victorian Afghanistan and Its Afterlives.” Contemporaries cluster, “Extraordinary Renditions,” edited by Kalyan Nadiminti, Post45, September 11, 2020.
“Victorian Afghanistan, the Iron Amir, and the Poetics of Marginal Sovereignty.” Victorian Studies, vol. 62, no. 1, 2019, pp. 35 – 60.
“The Work/Life Equation: Notes toward De-Privatizing the Maternal.” The Politics of Reproduction: Adoption, Abortion, and Surrogacy in the Age of Neoliberalism. Edited by Modhumita Roy and Mary Thompson, Ohio State University Press, 2019.
College of Arts & Letters News
- English Major Reflects on MSU Education as She Prepares to GraduateCollege of Arts & Letters
May 2, 2023Katie Burkhardt is graduating from Michigan State University in Spring 2023 with a B.A. in English. She is a member of the Honors College and would eventually like to pursue a Ph.D. in Sociology. Zarena Aslami, Associate Professor in the Department of English, had this to say […] Read Now →
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