Sarah Zahed

Assistant Professor

Dr. Sarah Zahed is an Assistant Professor of Global and Postcolonial Literature, specializing in nationalism studies and its relation to British and Imperial political thought in 20th and 21st-century South Asian and Middle Eastern literature. Her research examines anticolonial, decolonial, postcolonial, and neo-colonial studies contrapuntally, with a focus on the evolution of the British Empire and its cultural legacies. Her work delves into postcolonial theory, translation studies, and the politics of language, particularly how colonial histories shape contemporary Anglophone global texts. She is currently working on a book project centered on Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s exploration of self-determination and imagined future communities. Dr. Zahed also serves as co-editor of Living in Languages, a journal dedicated to translation scholarship.

Dr. Zahed earned her Ph.D. in English from State University of New York, University at Albany, where her dissertation on Israeli and Palestinian poets received the Initiative for Women Award. She teaches courses on postcolonial theory, South Asian, Middle Eastern, Jewish American, and Arab American literatures. She previously served as the Assistant Director of the Writing Center at the University at Albany, a role that informs her current research on decolonizing academic writing pedagogies, particularly for multilingual student writers.