ڈاکٹر نجیبہ عارف

ڈاکٹر نجیبہ عارف

Prof. Dr Najeeba Arif has been appointed as Chair person Academy of Lettres, Islamabad. She was Dean of the Faculty of Languages and Literature (FLL) at International Islamic University Islamabad (IIUI). Dr. Najeeba is a Professor at the Department of Urdu in International Islamic University, Islamabad and is the founder-editor of the Index of Urdu Journals. She 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 Encyclopedia 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 Hayder Multani and Ghulam Rasul Alampuri. 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.