Sabrina Sadique
Sabrina Sadique came to the United States from Dhaka, Bangladesh to study Chemistry and advance her training in the Natural Sciences, but a course with Professor Sara Suleri Goodyear on Urdu poets and images of the “Orient” in English Romantic poetry convinced her to switch focus to English Literature in the midst of her third year of undergraduate studies. Winner of the Francis Bergen Memorial Prize for Fiction awarded by the Yale Literary Magazine and the Elmore A. Willetz Prize for Fiction awarded by the English department, Sadique received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University with distinction in the major. She completed two undergraduate theses: a critical thesis that probed the concept of hybridity through the historical abrogation of the satanic verses from the Qur’ān and their literary reconstruction in Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses, and a creative thesis that comprised a collection of short fictional stories rooted in Dhaka, the city where she was born and raised. Novelist Amy Bloom and poet J.D. McClatchy supervised her story collection.
Sadique is currently completing her PhD in Global Anglophone Literature in the English Department at Harvard University under the guidance of Shakespeare scholar Marjorie Garber, literary critic James Wood, comparative cultural theorist Biodun Jeyifo, and poet/critic Stephen Burt. Sadique’s doctoral dissertation compares literary formulations of gender and Islam between the postcolonial and post-9/11 narrative modes with an emphasis on issues of globalization and Muslim diaspora. It engages psychoanalytic techniques for understanding terrorism and trauma through memoirs published in the United States after the attack on the World Trade Center.
At Harvard, Sadique has taught undergraduate courses that ranged from the study of theater, psychoanalysis, and Shakespeare to Science Fiction and Postwar American and British Fiction. Distinguished by Harvard’s Derek Bok Teaching Center for her pedagogic contributions, Sadique has received the Francis James Child Prize for excellence in teaching her advanced undergraduate English course “Gender, Sex, Nation,” a version of which was taught to male inmates at a correctional facility in Connecticut through the Wesleyan Center of Prison Education. Sadique was also nominated for the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching by the Harvard Undergraduate Council.
A former House Director of the Stanford Summer Session, Assistant Dean of the General Program of Harvard Summer Programs, and Resident Tutor in English and Race Relations at Dunster House, Sadique is now looking forward to building a sustainable cabin in New England woods, writing fiction and Sufi poetry, and teaching literature to those without access to higher education. Paradise Lost, King Lear, The Book of Job, T.S. Eliot's The Four Quartets, and Rilke’s The Duino Elegies are her favorite texts. In her spare time, Sadique translates unexplored Bengali literature into English, interprets scriptures from disparate theological traditions, and goes on unmapped hikes to collect geodes. Upon submission of her PhD thesis, she hopes to hold a fistful of Himalayan and Kilimanjaro snow and complete pilgrimages to the Kaaba in Mecca and the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia.
