Mursal Sidiqi (مرسل صدیقی) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Their work will be featured in Comparative Literature Studies and The Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Their dissertation project spans the eighteenth and nineteenth century to trace British technologies of national, racial, and gender formation as Britain first began to imagine the Afghan polity and the Afghan subject. Mursal’s work interweaves queer studies, empire studies, and translation studies to examine the entanglements of Afghan and British literary histories of sexuality.

In addition to teaching Writing Composition and English as a Second Language courses, they have designed and taught interdisciplinary undergraduate seminars such as “A Whole New World: Transformations and Translations of the Arabian Nights.” Mursal was previously a co-organizer of Penn English’s Latitudes working group, hosting scholars of the global south and comparative race studies to discuss and workshop their current academic and creative projects, in addition to the Restoration/Victorian Studies working group, featuring scholars’ work on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.