Neelofer Qadir
Assistant Professor of English and Affiliate Faculty of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Georgia State University
Neelofer Qadir is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and affiliated faculty at the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Institute at Georgia State University. During 2025-26, she is a Humanities Research Center fellow (Maymester 2025 cohort).
Currently, Neelofer is working on her first book project, tentatively titled Afrasian Imaginaries: Global Capitalism in Indian Ocean Worlds. The book is an interdisciplinary, multi-sited study that attends to the rich historical and contemporary relationships between African and Asian Indian Ocean communities. By centralizing how multidirectional migrancy figures into histories of global racial capitalism that have otherwise been scripted as narratives of unidirectional migrations, Afrasian Imaginaries seeks to rescript how histories of capitalism have been told.
At GSU, Neelofer teaches courses on 20th and 21st century literary and cultural studies focusing on Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean; colonialism, postcolonialism, and empire studies; histories of global capitalism; race, gender, and sexuality studies.
Previously, Neelofer was jointly appointed to the department of English and the Program in International and Global Studies at University of North Carolina Greensboro, where she was also affiliated faculty to the Program in African American and African Diaspora Studies. At UNCG, she was the founding co-convened of the Eastern Africa in the Indian Ocean World Research Network. During the 2022-23 academic year, her research was supported by a Career Enhancement Fellowship (Institute of Citizens and Scholars; Andrew W. Mellon Foundation).
Neelofer received her MA and PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she taught literature and composition courses. Her pedagogy is also informed by her work as a Writing Associate at Amherst College, where in addition to 1:1 consultations, she facilitated an online support group for thesis writers. During AY 2018-19, Neelofer was a research associate in residence at the Five College Women's Studies Research Center.