Shah Abdul Hannan

Professor Dr. Md. Mahmudul Hasan, joined the Department of English Language and Literature at International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) on June 1, 2010. The courses he has taught at IIUM include South Asian Literature in English, Islamic Literature in English, Twentieth-Century British Literature, and World Literature. He has completed supervising five PhD, nine Masters, and a number of FYP theses mainly in the fields of English, postcolonial/global, and feminist literatures. My work at IIUM manifests an interplay between English and postcolonial studies. He received pre-university education under Bangladesh Madrasah Education Board where the curriculum included courses in Arabic and Islamic studies along with more general subjects. His twelve-year madrasah education has been rewarding, as it helped him lay the foundation of my knowledge of Islam as well as Arabic and Urdu languages, along with Bangla and English. Since completing a PhD in comparative/global literature at Portsmouth (UK), he has taught at the University of Dhaka (3 years) and IIUM (13 years) in addition to doing a postdoctoral stint at Heidelberg in Germany. He has presented papers at conferences held in the USA, UK, Australia, Japan, Canada, Malta, and other countries. He has published in the fields of feminist, postcolonial, Islamic, South Asian, and Muslim diasporic literatures as well as Islam and English studies with presses such as the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, Brill, Georgia Southern University, IIIT, IIUM, Orient BlackSwan, Routledge, SAGE, Wiley-Blackwell, and others. He guest-edited (with Mohammad A. Quayum of Flinders University) “Special Focus: Bangladeshi Literature in English,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing (Routledge), 58:6, 2022. He is the author of Islamic Perspectives on Twentieth-Century English Literature (2017). His coedited books include Bangladeshi Literature in English: A Critical Anthology (2021), A Feminist Foremother: Critical Essays on Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (2017), Islam and Gender: The Bangladesh Perspective (2016), Tales of Mothers (vols. 1 & 2, 2015 & 2019), Civilization and Society: Essays on Politics and Culture of South Asia and Other Issues (2022/1994), and Displaced & Forgotten (2017) that contains memoirs of refugees from Afghanistan, Myanmar, Palestine, Somalia, and Syria as well as interviews with those from Cambodia, Kashmir, and Syria. His articles has appeared in some of the best journals in the fields of literary, postcolonial/global, South Asian, and cultural studies, including Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Paedagogica Historica, South Asia Research, The Muslim World, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Hawwa, History of Education & Children’s Literature, and Asiatic. His PhD thesis “Introducing Rokeya’s Plural Feminism” completed at the University of Portsmouth in 2007 focused on comparing the South Asian writer Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s (1880-1932) works with those of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Attia Hosain (1913-98), and Monica Ali (1967-). His interest in South Asian literature was further stimulated when he researched South Asian Muslim feminist literature during my postdoctoral work at Heidelberg in 2009-2010. During his PhD years, he supplies taught at British primary and secondary schools and team taught a course titled “Text in the City” at the University of Portsmouth. He writes op-eds and literary pieces mainly for The Daily Star (Bangladesh), New Age (Bangladesh), and The New Straits Times (Malaysia). He contributed essays to now extinct Literature @ Portsmouth.