Aqsa Ijaz is a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University where she is completing her dissertation on Nizami Ganjavi’s reception in Persianate India. Her dissertation, entitled Shaping the Language of Love: The Afterlife of Nizami Ganjavi’s Khusrau u Shirin in Hindustan reconstructs the aesthetic experience of Nizami’s North Indian readers who consistently wrote responses to Nizami’s celebrated love-poem in various North Indian vernaculars, such as Urdu, Punjabi, and Persian between the 14th and 19th centuries. Focusing on the role of poetry in shaping the emotional landscape of Persianate India, Aqsa highlights the role of Nizami’s Khusrau u Shirin and argues that the vibrant reception of Nizami’s poem in literate and non-literate settings of premodern North India provides us with an archive containing a trans-temporal dialogue on the question of passionate love and allows us to write a history of emotion from a culturally distinct and emic point of Nizami’s historical readers.

Aqsa is a philologist, singer, translator, and a book reviewer. Her work regularly appears in various international publications such as the World Literature Today, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Dawn, and The Marginalia Review of Books. She loves to talk about Persian literary traditions to a wide-ranging audience and appears regularly on podcasts such as Stanford University’s famous radio show, The Entitled Opinions. At the heart of her scholarly work is a commitment to emphasise the role of literature as a vehicle to foster global understanding of historically marginalised intellectual traditions and foster a truly humanistic dialogue on the questions of perennial human significance.