Siraj Dean Ahmed

Assistant Professor of English

"For me, literature's ultimate power lies in its always unpredictable capacity to help us experience what has remained on the margins of our consciousness. Out of respect for this power, I try in class to work with my students' particular responses as least as much as my own preconceived ideas."

Contact:
Siraj Dean Ahmed
8 Park Street, Room 15
413-538-3238

Joined MHC: 2003

Education:

  • Columbia University, Ph.D.
  • University of Pennsylvania, B.A.

Specialization: Literature, imperialism, and the Enlightenment; postcolonial studies; post-Enlightenment continental philosophy; post-Fascist Italian literature and film

Siraj Ahmed received his degrees in English and philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a Benjamin Franklin Scholar and graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and in English and comparative literature from Columbia, where he held fellowships from the Mellon and Whiting Foundations.

Until May 2003, Ahmed was assistant professor of English, comparative literature, and film studies at Texas A&M, where he won an excellence in teaching award and numerous research grants. He taught undergraduate courses on the early history of the novel; the postcolonial novel in Africa and Asia; theory after Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud; the idea of cultural revolution; and connections between Italian neorealism and French visual theory after Debord; and graduate courses on the practice of critique in the Enlightenment; Enlightenment globalization; and postcolonial fiction, cinema, and theory. He spent one semester at A&M's Tuscany site, where his courses explored connections between postcolonial and post-Fascist Italian fiction, film, and drama, and he discussed African agitprop theater at A&M's Mexico City Center.

Ahmed's writing has appeared in Representations and Passages, among other scholarly journals and essay collections, and he has lectured in London and San Juan, among many other cities. He is currently at work on a manuscript about the first century of British rule in India, tentatively entitled The Stillbirth of Capital: Enlightenment, Early British India, and Empire's Origins.

Ahmed began teaching at Mount Holyoke in January 2004, offering interdisciplinary courses that explore how literature, film, and philosophy—European, colonial, and postcolonial—respond to the long history of globalization.

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