Happy Hour: Discovering Faulkner’s American South in 1990s Pakistan with Dr. Saima Sherazi

Sponsored by the ESU Central Pennsylvania Branch

The 1990s found agrarian societies in Pakistan undergoing profound transitions, not unlike the American South in the first part of the twentieth century. William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” captures the stark confrontation between waning Southern aristocracy (the Compson family) and the ascendant middle class represented by the Snopes family.

Dr. Saima Sherazi will take us through the experience of coping with societal change, especially when that change occurs in a setting with entrenched social hierarchies and gender roles. That setting could be rural Pakistan, or the American South of the 1920s. In either place there is upheaval – urbanization and industrialization collide with traditional dynamics of gender and class.  Dr. Sherazi will share her experience of teaching Faulkner in an all-girls college in a still conservative Pakistan – far removed from the American South, but nonetheless undergoing similar social upheavals. This ESU Happy Hour is sponsored by the ESU Central PA Branch. ESU Happy Hour programs are online, free, and open to all members and the public. Registration is required. All programs take place on Eastern Time.

Register Here

About Dr. Saima Sherazi

Dr. Saima Nawaz Sherazi embarked on her academic journey at Kinnaird College for Women in Lahore, Pakistan, where she studied English, Economics, and Psychology. She went on to do Masters in English and American Literature and then a PhD in Applied Linguistics and English Language Teaching from University of Warwick. An outdoor steel sculpture ‘Let’s not be stupid’, by Richard Deacon situated within the University of Warwick’s grounds, holds particular significance for her. It symbolizes for her the delicate balance she has maintained between ‘constraint and freedom’ shedding the shackles of traditional expectations and prejudices through education.

Dr Sherazi has shared her expertise at esteemed institutions in both Pakistan and the UK, including Lahore College for Women University, Kinnaird College, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Aston University, Coventry University, University of Warwick, and Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). During her tenure at Kinnaird College, she taught American Literature to postgraduate students, exploring works by William Faulkner, Eugene O’Neill, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, and Toni Morrison. At LUMS, she also contributed as a consultant to the Virtual University of Pakistan, designing English Language and Technical Writing Courses.

She also consulted on projects for the World Bank, the most notable amongst them being the taskforce on taxation reform and was the editor of the taskforce’s composite Report on Tax Reform of Pakistan. Currently, Dr. Sherazi focuses on applied linguistics at QMUL. Her research interests revolve around collaborative semi-embedded approaches to writing pedagogy and the integration of elearning multimedia materials in higher education.

She also serves as the head of the Language Centre at Queen Mary’s School of Languages, Linguistics, and Film. Beyond her professional pursuits, Dr. Sherazi maintains an abiding interest in feminist critical theory and advocating for gender equality for women in the South Asian subcontinent.

Cocktail: 

French 75 cocktail