Fatima Burney

Fatima Burney is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Merced, affiliated with the Literatures and Languages Department under the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts. Her research sits at the intersection of global romanticism, multilingual literature, and ecocriticism, with a focus on the interplay between English, Urdu, and Persian in shaping literary traditions.

• Education: Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (UCLA, 2017), BA in South Asian Studies (Wellesley College, 2010).

Burney’s work interrogates how English emerged as a global lingua franca, examining how colonial translation practices and frontier dynamics reshaped anglophone literary norms. She positions the ghazal as a central genre to challenge the hegemony of the anglophone novel in world literature debates. Her publications include articles in Journal of World Literature, Comparative Critical Studies, and Philological Encounters.

Key research themes include:

• Anglo-Persianate verse culture
• Frontier historiography in literary studies
• Decolonizing literary theory
• Lyricization of non-Western forms

Her current book project, Lyric Empire: Persianate Poetry in an Anglophone World, reframes global anglophone literature as a ‘frontier phenomenon’ shaped by vernacularization processes. She previously held a postdoctoral fellowship with the Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies project at SOAS, University of London, funded by the European Research Council.