Azfar Hussain
Dr Azfar Hussain is director of the graduate programme in social innovation and professor of integrative/interdisciplinary studies at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, US. He is also summer distinguished professor of English and Humanities at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB) and vice-president of US-based Global Center for Advanced Studies.
127th Birth Anniversary of Kazi Nazrul Islam / Kazi Nazrul Islam: Rebellion, Revolution, Relevance
24 May 2026, 10:00 AM
Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976) is one of the greatest Bangla-language poets and a formidable revolutionary poet.
24 May 2026, 10:00 AM
Independence and its discontents: For whom was 1971?
26 March 2026, 09:00 AM
The emergence of a Muslim-majority Bangladesh grounded in ethno-linguistic Bangalee nationalism delivers a clear historical verdict: language, culture, and lived social realities matter more than theological or statist abstractions.
26 March 2026, 09:00 AM
ESSAY / Money and language: Transaction and tension
19 February 2026, 00:00 AM
In addition to today’s transnational corporations and the global explosion of their advertisements, the works of William Shakespeare and Karl Marx keep teaching us a great deal about the relationship between money and language.
19 February 2026, 00:00 AM
REFLECTIONS / Moon, memory, manifesto: A personal, lyrical essay on Atrai
21 November 2025, 18:28 PM
These two things—the river and the train—continue to haunt and fascinate me.
21 November 2025, 18:28 PM
ESSAY / Between silence and song: Early Bangla literature and the poetics of the ‘Charyapada’
24 October 2025, 19:37 PM
Pandit Haraprasad Shastri read—and was deeply inspired by—Raja Rajendralal Mitra’s seminal work Sanskrit Buddhist Literature of Nepal, published in 1882. That book was instrumental in inaugurating a whole new age in the history of Bangla language and literature.
24 October 2025, 19:37 PM
Syed Manzoorul Islam: Teacher, taleweaver, torchbearer, trailblazer
12 October 2025, 04:00 AM
As I write—still devastated by his passing—I hear his voice in my head: telling stories without end, stories that breathe life, stories that dream of a new world,
12 October 2025, 04:00 AM
90th birthday of Serajul Islam Choudhury / Interrogating power, envisioning emancipation
23 June 2025, 02:00 AM
His work does not merely interpret the world; it is involved in the struggle to change it.
23 June 2025, 02:00 AM
Language, land, labour, and liberation: Reclaiming the radical roots of Ekushey
20 February 2025, 18:00 PM
Every time the question of language surfaces it means that a series of other problems are coming to the fore.
20 February 2025, 18:00 PM
The Khapra Ward Day: The Moment and the Movement
April 24, 1950. It was a sunlit Monday morning. There were 39—according to some, 42—political prisoners in the famous Khapra Ward
22 April 2016, 18:00 PM