Dr. Mosarrap Hossain Khan

Dr. Mosarrap H. Khan received his Ph.D. in South Asian literatures and cultures from the Department of English, New York University, USA, in 2018. His doctoral dissertation argues that South Asian Muslim writers’ attention to ordinary practices of illicit love, “modern” education, and consumerism, in contrast to extraordinary events, produces a discourse on the complex negotiation between the sacral and the secular by Muslims at the contemporary moment. Through advancing a new conceptual category of “worldly subjectivity”, he demonstrates the instabilities and inconsistencies in Muslim subject formation torn between religious commitment and worldly desires.

His most recently published essay, “The Idea of a University and the Invention of Culture in Colonial/Post-colonial India” (2018), theorizes the cultural mission of the Indian university, which is significantly different from the western university, in a globalized technocratic world, given to notions of ‘excellence’. His other essay, “Transgressive Desire, Everyday Life, and the Production of ‘Modernity’ in Pakistani Anglophone Fiction” (2018), demonstrates the gaps and fissures in Muslim subject formation in a globalized, consumerist world. Currently, he is co-editing a book, ‘Mapping Muslim Life in West Bengal’, on political, literary, and cultural aspects of Muslim life in post-Independent West Bengal. In addition, he is converting his doctoral dissertation into a monograph.

In order to build an intellectual community around his research concerns, he has organized three panels at the MLA conference in 2013, 2014, and 2015. He has also presented invited lectures and research papers at Harvard University, Princeton University, New York University, Presidency University (Kolkata), Kazi Nazrul University, among others. In 2007, he convened and organized a UGC-sponsored national conference on post-Rushdie Indian English Fiction at Kurseong College, University of North Bengal. He has worked as an editorial assistant for Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies and as a book reviewer for San Francisco-based Hyphen Magazine. He is a founding-editor at Café Dissensus, an online journal of literature, culture, and politics. His creative writings and political commentary pieces have appeared on various popular portals.