Maryam Wasif is a literary historian, comparatist, and close reader. She studied Comparative Literature at UCLA and earned her undergraduate degree in Comparative Literature, with a minor in European Cultural Studies, from Princeton University. Her first book, Who is a Muslim? Orientalism and Literary Populisms (Fordham University Press, 2021), examines orientalism’s impact on modern vernacular literatures, showing how the Urdu literary canon—particularly prose—emerged around questions of identity, piety, and citizenship in colonial and postcolonial South Asia. She is currently working on a project that re-examines canonical Western texts beyond the Euro-American academy, while teaching in the Comparative Literature and Creative Arts (CLCA) program.