Fatima Burney

I received my doctoral degree in Comparative Literature from the University of California Los Angeles (2017) and was a postdoctoral fellow with the Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies project at SOAS (2017-2020) before joining UC Merced in 2020. While my teaching revolves around materials written in (or translated into) English, my research is multilingual and considers the relational dynamics between languages and language cultures. I'm especially interested in how the 'rise' of English—from the language of a small island nation to a global lingua franca of historically unprecedented scale—has resulted in anglophone ‘norms and forms’ becoming part of the conceptual infrastructure through which the possibilities of intercultural understanding are filtered. Against this backdrop, my work reframes global anglophone as a ‘frontier phenomenon’ that was mutable to the diverse contexts in which English has become vernacularized. In other words, where some scholars envision anglophone culture diffusing outwards from centers of imperial power to the geographical ‘margins’, my research highlights the multilingual processes of translation, philology, and colonial language pedagogy that reshaped the anglophone sphere from the frontier inwards. This comparative framework especially emphasizes the idealized position of borderlands and folk culture in global romanticism. Through a ‘frontier-forward’ approach, I seek to denaturalize the aesthetic and ideological norms of anglophone literariness that have a present monopoly in the field. My work has been published in the Journal of World Literature, Comparative Critical Studies, Philological Encounters, American Literary Review and Comparative Literature Studies. I was also the coeditor of the special issue “West-East Lyric: A Comparative Approach to Lyric History”. I’m currently working on a book that historicizes the lyricization of the ghazal in anglophone debates on world poetry. You can find more information about my work on my website below