Pasha M. Khan

Associate Professor

Chair in Urdu Language and Culture

Undergraduate Program Director

I am the Chair in Urdu Language and Culture and an Associate Professor at the Institute of Islamic Studies. I work on South Asian literatures, including literature in Urdu-Hindi, Persian, Punjabi, and Arabic. I teach courses on Sufism, the cultural history of South Asia, marvellous tales in the Islamicate world, Urdu poetry, and the history and cultures of the South Asian and Muslim diaspora, particularly in Canada.

My first book, The Broken Spell: Indian Storytelling and the Romance Genre in Persian and Urdu (https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/broken-spell), is about the Islamicate romance (qissah/dastan), its form, performance, and epistemological underpinnings. My next book, provisionally entitled The Generous Infidel, will deal with ethics, exemplarity, generosity, and gift theory; and gender performance and heteronormativity in the qissahs, films, plays, and comic-book representations of the pre-Islamic hero Hatim Ta'i.


I maintain the Noon Meem Rashed Archive (http://nmrashedarchive.com/), an extensive collection of the letters, poetry drafts, photographs and life records of "Noon Meem" Rashed (Nazri Muhammad Rashed, 1910-1975), one of the most important Urdu poets of the 20th century, and a pioneer of Urdu modernist literature. Rashed's papers and personal effects were donated to the Institute in 2013 by his daughter, Yasmin Rashed Hassan.

I received my PhD at Columbia University in 2013, where my supervisor was the Urdu scholar Prof. Frances Pritchett. I am McGill’s second holder of the Urdu Chair, which was established in 1986 by the Governments of Canada and Pakistan, and McGill University. The holder of the Chair is responsible for teaching Urdu language courses, and performing research in the history and literature of the Urdu-speaking peoples of South Asia, and other areas, including Canada.