Zain R. Mian is interested in contemporary debates on World Literature, the sociology of literary institutions and forms, as well as historiographical theory, genre theory, and narratology more broadly. Zain’s Masters research project, “The Reluctant Comparatists: Towards A Reconceptualization of Pakistani Literature,” was awarded the Postgraduate Essay Prize by the Postcolonial Studies Association. He is currently conducting preliminary work for a dissertation on the theoretical status of the journal as a literary form, contextualized within the Urdu and Anglophone traditions. Mian spent the summer of 2020 learning Python in order to develop two datasets on postcolonial literary texts and their readerships.