ZUBAIR QURESHI
Well-known educationist, poet, critic, researcher and intellectual Prof DrNajibaArifhas taken charge as the Chairperson of the Pakistan Academy of Letters (PAL). She is the first woman chairperson of the PAL.
Director of PAL Mohammad Asim Butt, senior officials AkhtarRazaSaleemi and others received the new chairperson on Tuesday upon her arrival at the academy.Later, she was briefed about the academy’s projects and ongoing literary activities.
Dr. NajibaArif has previously served as Faculty Dean, Department of Linguistics and Literature at International Islamic University, Islamabad.
NajibaArif is a creative writer, poet and critic. She has authored and edited thirteen books and published more than 50 research papers in national and international journals and volumes like Annual of Urdu Studies (US), The Journal of Indology and South Asian Studies (Germany) and the Encyclopaedia of the World of Islam.
Her collection of poetry Ma’āni se Ziyāda won the Oxford University Press Award for Urdu Literature, 2015. She has also published her short stories, travel narratives and memoirs.
In research, her field of interest is socio-political study of South Asian literature, Sufism and its literary manifestations and Occidentalism. She studied the impact of 9/11 on Urdu fiction and poetry in 2010 and presented it in a conference at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her post-doc research at SOAS focused on the Study of travel narratives of the South Asian Muslims who visited Europe in the colonial period and compiled their views about the West.
She discovered and edited a few rare manuscripts of the travelogues and biographies of South Asian Muslims, penned in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.
She also studied and wrote about classical Punjabi Sufi poets including Bullhe Shah, Mian Muhammad Bakhsh, Ali HayderMultani and GhulamRasulAlampuri. She has presented papers in several International and national conferences and seminars in and out of Pakistan.
Translation is one of her recent passions and she has translated multiple writings from English to Urdu, including a voluminous book on Mysticism, Philosophy and Science. She edited the renowned research journals Meyār (2009-2010) and Bunyād, (2013-2016) in the past.
Literary circles at home and abroad have welcomed Dr. NajibaArif’s appointment as Chairperson,PAL for the promotion of literature and the welfare of writers and have expressed their best wishes for her.
