I am primarily a literary historian, but also a dedicated comparatist and close reader. My first book, Who is a Muslim? Orientalism and Literary Populisms (Fordham University Press, 2021), argues for a renewed interrogation of the European scholarly discipline and cultural practice, orientalism, and its influence on modern vernacular literatures. It shows how the Urdu literary canon, particularly prose, is formed around the orientalist question of who constitutes a Muslim in colonial and later, postcolonial, South Asia. The book spans some three centuries and takes its archive from both England and North-India in an effort to highlight how the Urdu literary formation becomes the authority-designate on questions of piety, national identity, and citizenship. I am currently working on a project that traces the role of Pakistan's state-owned channel, PTV's drama serials in shaping the nation's social imagination during the first five decades or so of the country's existence. While I teach courses that range from the CLCA freshman core to the senior core in methodology, my central concern is always that of writing and the forms through which we can write and think about non-English literary texts.