Tasmiyah Ahmad (She/Her)

Tasmiyah Ahmad is a first year UKRI AHRC SWWDTP Doctoral Researcher in the Department of English and Creative Writing, Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Exeter, with a secondary affiliation at the University of Bristol.

Her research centres on South Asian literature, focusing on the works of Indian Muslim women writers - Nazar Sajjad Hyder, Wajida Tabassum, and Mehrunnisa Parvez. She examines how the Islam/secular binary governing most scholarship on Muslim women’s writing fails to register the releigious, cultural and political worlds these writers depict. Her research sits at the intersection of postcolonial theory, Islamic and secular feminisms, South Asian literature and literary history (particularly Indian), Islamic/ Muslim literatures of India and theories of vernacular cosmopolitanism, with particular attention to agency, gender, class, caste, religion, culture, socio-economic dynamics and interreligious co-inhabitation.

Supervised by Professor Amina Yaqin (primary, Exeter) and Dr Tara K Puri (secondary, Bristol), Tasmiyah’s project seeks to develop new concept to interrogate the Islam/secular binary in scholarship on Indian Muslim women’s fiction and to theorise the Indian Muslim women's agency and cultural worlds these writers depict.