Aqsa Ijaz is an essayist, musician, translator, and teaches courses in Persian, Punjabi and Urdu languages at the Department of Language Studies, as well as a popular course, Being Human in South Asia in the Department of Historical Studies at University of Toronto Mississauga. She is a literary scholar with a demonstrated interest in multilingualism, linguistics, and cultural studies and her work covers a vast range of texts, from premodern manuscript traditions, oral performances, and lithographs to modern graphic novel.
Her current research focuses on the reception of classical Persian narrative poetry in premodern South Asia and her upcoming monograph, entitled Shaping the Language of Love: The Afterlife of Nizami Ganjavi’s Khusrau u Shirin in Hindustan, investigates the multiple models of love and desire in the Urdu, Persian, and Punjabi reception of the twelfth-century Persian poet Nizami of Ganjeh and theorises the role of multilingual retellings in ensuring the continued resonance of his widely celebrated love poem Ḳhusrau u Shīrīn in medieval, early modern, and colonial periods.
Aqsa is also one of the architects for the Global Past Research Initiative at the Department of Historical Studies and is helping to shape and materialize the vision of this international call to action for a new model of humanistic education. She is also committed to sharing academic knowledge with the world outside of the university and for that she serves on the editorial board of The Marginalia Review of Books. Her recent work includes the publication of her English translation (in collaboration) of the award-winning French graphic novel, Majnun and Laila: Songs from Beyond the Grave, and more recently an annotated English translation of the 18th century Persian history of Sindh, entitled The Gift of the Generous. In her spare time, you’ll find her tucked neatly behind her cello practicing away.