Aqsa Ijaz

Aqsa Ijaz is an essayist, musician, translator, and literary scholar who teaches courses in Persian, Punjabi, and Urdu language at the Department of Language Studies, as well as the popular interdisciplinary course “Being Human in South Asia” in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

Her research and teaching reflect a deep engagement with multilingualism, philology, music, and reception spanning a wide range of materials—from premodern manuscripts, oral performances, and lithographs to modern graphic novels. Her forthcoming monograph with Edinburgh University Press, Shaping the Language of Love: Reading Nizami Ganjavi’s Khusrau o Shirin in Persianate India (13th to 19th Century) explores the reception of Niẓāmī Ganjavī’s twelfth-century narrative poem Khusrau o Shirin across Persian, Urdu, and Punjabi literary spheres, theorizing how multilingual retellings and adaptations sustained its resonance across medieval, early modern, and colonial South Asia. By tracing the poem’s transformations across languages, regions, and aesthetic and religious traditions, the project reimagines Persianate literary history through the lens of reception, multilingualism, and translation—challenging monolingual and nation-bound models of world literature, and proposing instead a transregional poetics of love as a site of ethical and aesthetic exchange.

Aqsa is also one of the architects of the Global Past Research Initiative in the Department of Historical Studies, where she helps shape and materialize an international call to action for a new model of humanistic education. Beyond academia, she is committed to public scholarship and serves on the masthead of The Marginalia Review of Books. Her recent publications include her English translation (in collaboration) of the award-winning French graphic novel Majnun and Laila: Songs from Beyond the Grave (Majnoun et Leïli : Chants d’outre-tombe) and her widely acclaimed annotated English translation of Tohfat al-Kirām, (Gift of the Generous) the eighteenth-century Persian history of Sindh by Mīr Sher ʿAlī Qāniʿ.

Current Courses

Fall/Winter 2025–26:

• PRS210 (Introductory Persian I)
• PRS211 (Introductory Persian II)
• PRS310 (Intermediate Persian I)
• PUN212 (Introductory Punjabi)

Education

• PhD, Islamic Studies, McGill University (Montreal, Canada)
• MPhil, Translation Studies and Comparative Literature, G.C. University (Pakistan)
• BA Hons, English Literature and Philosophy (minor in French), G.C. University (Pakistan)

Areas of Teaching and Research Interests

• Persian and Persianate literatures
• Intellectual history
• Iranian and South Asian Cultural History
• Translation
• Urdu language
• Punjabi language
• Persian language

Selected Publications

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

• Ijaz, Aqsa, and Sara Molaie. “Celestial Crossings: Literary Reception of Tāhirih Qurrat al-ʿAyn in the Indian Subcontinent.” Women Poets Iranica (Encyclopaedia Iranica Foundation, 2025). https://doi.org/10.70501/wpi9y4t-8mnn.
• Ijaz, Aqsa. “Beyond Imitation: A Case for the Hermeneutic Agency of Persianate Literary Retellings.” Postmedieval 15 (2024): 783–817. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-024-00333-2.
• Ijaz, Aqsa. “Retelling as Resistance: Translating Niẓāmī’s Ḳhusrau u Shīrīn in Colonial India.” Journal of Urdu Studies 4, no. 2 (2024): 117–150. https://doi.org/10.1163/26659050-12340056. 

Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters

• 2026 — Ijaz, Aqsa. “Multilingual Persian: Toward a Socially Just and Embodied Pedagogy in Persian Language Instruction.” Iran Namag. In press.
• 2025 — Ijaz, Aqsa. “Sowing Suḳhan, Reaping Tradition: Reimagining Comparative Practices through Persianate Reception Histories.” In Premodern Comparative Practices in the Islamicate World, edited by Hany Rashwan, David Larsen, and Huda Fakhradine. Oxford University Press. In press.
• 2020 — Ijaz, Aqsa. “Reading Between the Postcolonial and the Transcultural in Mirza Athar Baig’s Ghulam Bagh.” In Pakistan: Alternative Imaginings of a Nation-State, edited by Jürgen Schaflechner, Christina Oesterheld, and Ayesha Asif, 46–71. Oxford University Press.