Biography
Zarena Aslami’s research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century British literature and culture. Special areas of interest include empire and colonialism studies, feminist theory, gender and sexuality studies, critical infrastructure studies, theories of liberalism and neoliberalism, disability studies, plant humanities, and the history and theory of the novel. 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 next book, Marginal Sovereignty: The Literatures of Empire and the Making of Victorian Afghanistan, 1798 – 1900, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press. It continues this line of inquiry, examining the affective content of political forms in a transnational context. Broadly, a study of the British empire, Marginal Sovereignty focuses on the case of Afghanistan, tracking how and why nineteenth-century British discourse cast it as vague and inassimilable. Her writing has also appeared in the journals Victorian Studies, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and Victorian Literature and Culture. 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
“The Fascia Hardens: Late-Victorian Women Writers and the ‘Strange Death’ of the Liberal Bourgeoisie,” The Cambridge History of Victorian Women’s Writing, edited by Carolyn Dever and Amy Kahrmann Huseby, Cambridge University Press, 2026, pp. 499–510.
Co-editor with Timothy Watson, Infrastructure, special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 52, no. 3, Summer 2024.
“Afghanistan in Victorian Literature.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, edited by David Ludden. Oxford University Press. Article published May 22, 2024; doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.765.
“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, edited by Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong, vol. 62, no. 3, 2020, 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, pp. 101–18.
“Ability.” Keywords, special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 46, no. 3/4, 2018, pp. 551–54. Honorable Mention for Best Special Issue of 2018 from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.
“Y is for Yakub Khan.” An ABC of Queen Victoria’s Empire, Or a Primer of Conquest, Dissent and Disruption, edited by Antoinette Burton, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, pp. 143–48.
“The Rise of the State as a Sympathetic Liberal Subject in Hardy’s The Woodlanders.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 42, no. 1, 2009, pp. 62–85.
“The Space of Optimism: State Fantasy and the Case of The Odd Women.” Victorian Studies, vol. 47, no. 1, 2004, pp. 55–85. Nominated by Victorian Studies for NAVSA’s Donald Gray Prize for best essay published in 2005.
Gallery
College of Arts & Letters News
- English Major Reflects on MSU Education as She Prepares to Graduate
College 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 →
SPARTANS WILL | © Michigan State University