Azfar Hussain, PhD
Honorary Vice President of GCAS
About Azfar
Azfar Hussain is the Honorary Vice President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies and GCAS Professor of English, World Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies. He is a prominent Bangladeshi theorist, critic, poet, translator, and activist.
Hussain is also Associate Professor of Liberal Studies/Interdisciplinary Studies at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, while he has taught English and World Literature, Ethnic Studies, American Studies, and Cultural Studies at Washington State University, Bowling Green State University, and Oklahoma State University, as well. In Bangladesh, he worked as a national weekly magazine editor, a member of a national-level left activist alliance, and as a university professor before he came to the United States.
Publications
Azfar Hussain has published—in both English and Bengali—hundreds of academic, popular, and creative pieces, including translations from several non-western languages. He has written on a wide range of topics in such areas as “third-world” Marxisms, critical theory, cultural politics, political economy, and theories and practices of interdisciplinarity, while he has also written on the literary productions from Asia, Africa, and Latin America and on such figures as Antonio Gramsci, W.E.B Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Maulana Bhasani, and Begum Rokeya, to mention but a few.
The author of the books The Wor(l)d in Question: Essays in Political Economy and Cultural Politics (Dhaka: Samhati Publications, 2008) and The Politics of Sites, Subjects, and Scenes: Micronarratives and Essays (forthcoming), Hussain has edited numerous issues of journals and magazines both in the US and outside it. Azfar Hussain is currently working on several books in both English and Bengali, a few of which are tentatively titled Towards a Political Economy of Land, Labor, Language, and the Body; Decolonizing Comparative Literature; and Marxisms in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
