Dr Fatima Z. Naveed
Postdoctoral Fellow, November 2025 – August 2026
Home Institution: University of Exeter
Dr Fatima Zehra Naveed is a literary historian whose work explores the intersections of literature, censorship, and politics in South Asia. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Exeter, and an MSc in International Development & Humanitarian Emergencies from the London School of Economics & Political Science. Her doctoral research presents the first complete literary history of the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) spanning pre-Partition activities and postcolonial transformations in both India and Pakistan. Her thesis traced the movement’s evolution from the 1930s to the 1970s, incorporating women’s writing, cinematic contributions and marginal Urdu and Hindi texts to reframe the PWA as a cross-border, multilingual literary network which persisted into the twentieth century despite political subjugation and censorship.
Fatima’s broader research interests include literary censorship, gender, and digital resistance in Pakistan. She is currently preparing a monograph on the PWA for Routledge and developing a second project on women’s writing, archives, and fictional representations of Partition. Her published and forthcoming work appears in Wasafiri, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies and Critical Pakistan Studies. She is co-founder of The Tasavvur Collective, a consortium of early career researchers focused on the cultural representations of South Asian Muslims, and has volunteered as a graduate mentor for Pakistan with Project EduAccess.
You can contact Fatima on social media via Bluesky, Twitter/X, and ORCiD.
Project title: Censoring a Nation: Blasphemy, Obscenity, and Sedition in Pakistan
This project explores how colonial-era censorship laws continue to shape the national identity and cultural production of Pakistan. Drawing on legal history, literary analysis, and decolonial theory, it examines how laws governing blasphemy, obscenity, and sedition—originally codified in the Indian Penal Code under British rule—have been selectively adapted by the Pakistani state to police cultural and religious expression. While often framed as “Islamic” or Shariah-based, this project reveals the enduring influence of Christian Evangelical morality and colonial legal legacies embedded in the neo-colonial state’s legislation. At a moment of intensifying state control in Pakistan, the project highlights how literature not only responds to censorship but also generates counter-narratives that resist state control, offering a South Asian perspective on global patterns of moral regulation, ideological nation-building, and the preservation of dissenting voices across history and the contemporary world.