Dr Umme Salma

I am a passionate English literature teacher and researcher, having received an education in English literature, linguistics, and language as well as the humanities. I have completed my PhD in Postcolonial Studies and Other Literature in English from the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Queensland, supported by the prestigious and highly competitive International Postgraduate Research Scholarship and the University of Queensland Centennial Scholarship. My research entwines eighteenth-century English literature and contemporary world anglophone literature, straddling migration and diaspora, subjectivity formation and agency, gender and age, and metaphors as a literary device. I have pursued my research within the South Asian region, with a particular focus on the underrepresented branch of Anglophone literature, for example, Bangladeshi literature in English. By engaging with the tension among colonial, postcolonial, and world literature writings, I foreground literary/fictional endeavours as tools to voice inequity, inequality, exclusion, and social justice, and to cultivate emotional intelligence. My poems reflect my multidisciplinary academic and critical literary perspectives, and thus, all my works have gradually been shaped by my life experiences as an emotional Bedouin.