Sabeena Shaikh is a scholar, dancer, and community organizer working at the intersection of gender, performance, and literary history. Her current project is a translation and critical study of the late eighteenth-century kulliyat of Lutf un-Nisa “Imtiyaz,” (1733?-?). The manuscript is one of the earliest surviving Urdu manuscripts attributed to a woman author, and Sabeena’s work situates it within the literary and social worlds of the Deccan, recovering a foundational and largely unread chapter in the history of women’s authorship in Urdu. Sabeena’s broader research interests include gender and performance; poetry and women’s authorship and voice; and the performed traditions of Urdu poetry, including ghazal and qawwali. She works across Islamic Studies, Literary and Media Studies, the Persianate world, and Manuscript Studies with a research and teaching interest in language pedagogy. Her work has been published in Arc: Journal of the School of Religious Studies, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, with forthcoming work in Modern Asian Studies. Sabeena remains committed to community building in practice, bringing scholarship, performance, and public life into conversation, and connecting academic work to activism. Her research languages are Hindi, Urdu, Braj Bhasha, and Persian and her geographic focus spans South Asia and Central Asia.