Accomplished Scholar Sadia Abbas Set to Publish First Novel

Rutgers University | RU-N English Professor Sadia Abbas grew up in Singapore and Karachi, Pakistan, with brief stints in Lahore and Peshawar. A specialist in postcolonial literature and theory, the culture and politics of Islam in modernity, and early modern English literature, she just published her first novel, The Empty Room (2017), due out in May. Set in 1970s Karachi in the decade leading up to and overlapping with the Zia dictatorship, it tells the story of a talented female artist struggling to find agency in a stifling arranged marriage as loved ones are caught up in the country’s cynically repressive regime.