Saba Pirzadeh is associate professor of English and environmental humanities. A Fulbright fellowship recipient, she completed her PhD in English and graduate certificate in Women and Gender Studies from Purdue University. She has published extensively in the areas of environmental humanities, climate crisis, resource extraction, petroculture, hydropolitics, interspecies relationality and socioecological justice. She helped to develop and implement the University's environmental studies minor. Her secondary research interests include popular culture and its articulation of the ideological and material realities of the postcolonial experience. She has been a research fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (Munich) and Bucknell Humanities Center (Pennsylvania). Saba was a part of "The Next Monsoon: Climate Change and Contemporary Cultural Production in South Asia", an NEH research project led by Ifthikar Dadi (Cornell University) and Sonal Khullar (University of Pennsylvania). Her current project examines the intersections of anthropocentric violence, environmental rupture and justice in South Asian Anglophone narratives. She is an editorial board member of South Asia Research.
Peer-reviewed publications:
- Saba Pirzadeh and Tehmina Pirzada. 鈥淓ntangled futures: Energy production. Ecospirituality, and Decolonial Hope in Indian Solarpunk Fiction.鈥 Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 1鈥16.
- 鈥淓nvironmental Futurities and Solastalgia in Global Speculative Fiction.鈥 The Speculative Route: Futures from South and Southwest Asia and North Africa. Eds. Merve Tabur, Sami, Ahmad Khan. Routledge Press, 2025.
- 鈥淧artition Migration and Urbicide in Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-Candy Man.鈥 Art and Architecture of Migration and Discrimination: Turkey, Pakistan, and their European Diasporas. Edited by Esra Akcan and Iftikhar Dadi. Routledge Press, 2023.
- Saba Pirzadeh and Tehmina Pirzada. 鈥淐inematic Empire and Nostalgia in Viceroy鈥檚 House and Victoria and Abdul.鈥 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Jan. 2022, doi:10.1177/00219894211066444.
- 鈥淧opular Fiction.鈥 The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene. Ed. John Parham. Cambridge UP, 2021.
- 鈥淣eoliberal Extraction and Aquatic Resistance in Helon Habila鈥檚 Oil on Water.鈥 Journal of Postcolonial Writing.
- "Postcolonial Development, Socio-ecological Degradation and Slow Violence in Pakistani Fiction.鈥 Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication. Ed. Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan and Vidya Sarveswaran. Routledge, 2019.
- 鈥淭opographies of Fear: War and Environmental Othering in Mirza Waheed鈥檚 The Collaborator and Nadeem Aslam鈥檚 The Blind Man鈥檚 Garden.鈥 Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 21.6 (2019): 892-907.
- Saba Pirzadeh and Tehmina Pirzada. 鈥淧akistani Popular Music: A Call to Reform in the Public Sphere.鈥 South Asian Popular Culture 17.2 (2019): 197-211.
- Saba Pirzadeh and Arielle McKee. 鈥淎rthurian Eco-conquest in Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, and La葷amon.鈥 Parergon 34.1 (2017): 1-24. doi:10.1353/pgn.2017.0000.
- 鈥淐hildren of Ravaged Worlds: Exploring Environmentalism in Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker and Cameron Stracher's The Water Wars.鈥 ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 22.2 (2015): 203-221. Oxford University Press.
- 鈥淧ersecution vs. Protection: Examining the Pernicious Politics of Environmental Conservation in The Hungry Tide.鈥 South Asian Review 36.2 (2015): 107-120.