Shemeem Burney Abbas

State University of New York at Purchase College
Visiting Professor of Political Science, Women’s Studies and Literature, 2005 to date

University of Texas at Austin
Visiting Faculty, Department of English/Division of Rhetoric and Composition, 2002-2005

Allama Iqbal Open University, Islamabad
Professor and Chair of the Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics, 1980-2003

Islam and the west; politics, law and gender in Islamic societies; linguistics and musics of South Asia (Pakistan and India); women’s studies; postcolonial English language and literature; creative writing.

Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin; M.A., University of Leeds (U.K.); B.A. Hons.(Panjab University)

Shemeem Burney Abbas is the author of The Female Voice in Sufi Ritual: Devotional Practices of Pakistan and India, published by the University of Texas Press in 2002 and Oxford University Press in 2003. Her research is on women’s rituals in Islamic societies. “Sakineh; the narrator of Kerbala,” is her chapter in The Women of Kerbala, published by the University of Texas Press, 2005. In 1993 UNICEF published Abbas’ Qissa Khwan, (Storyteller) a collection of short stories for girls. Her other publications focus on English Language Teaching in South Asia. She is currently working on a novel set in Kashmir; she is additionally working on a book about postcolonial laws in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the post cold-war period. Abbas launched the largest graduate teacher-training program in English as a Foreign Language for South Asia, through the Allama Iqbal Open University in Islamabad.