Sarah Zahed

Assistant Professor of Global and Postcolonial Literature

Dr. Zahed’s scholarship examines modern and contemporary literature of South Asia and the SWANA region, with particular attention to how writers respond to colonialism, imperialism, and their legacies.  Her work explores how questions of nationalism, memory, and political imagination shape cultural expression across diverse contexts. A chapter of her doctoral dissertation, Love After Catastrophe: Spaces in-between, which takes up Hannah Arendt’s philosophy of love as a framework for reading Yehuda Amichai and Mahmoud Darwish, was awarded the Initiative for Women Fellowship at the University at Albany.

Her current book project continues this trajectory, investigating how poets such as Darwish and Amichai reimagine belonging, intimacy, and community amid histories of migration and displacement. She is also developing a related line of research on oral storytelling traditions among immigrant and migrant communities from South Asia and the SWANA region in the United States, exploring how narratives of memory and belonging circulate across languages and cultural contexts. Together, these projects extend her interest in comparative poetics into community-based research. In addition, she serves as co-editor of Living in Languages, a journal devoted to translation studies.

Dr. Zahed has taught a wide range of courses in literature, writing, and pedagogy, including classes on women writers and nationalism, exilic literature and immigrant literature, Arab and Jewish American experiences, postcolonial studies, multiethnic literature, and writing pedagogy. This breadth reflects her commitment to exploring transnational perspectives, comparative approaches, and the politics of language and identity.

Currently, she is teaching:

ENG 295: Gateway to Advanced Literary Studies

ENG 221: Global Literature

ENG 218: Postcolonial Literature

ENG 327/527: Contemporary Cross-Cultural Literature

ENG 101: Composition