Speaking Volumes: Meet Sabeena Shaikh

When Sabeena Shaikh began university, she thought her future was already spoken for. Medicine was the plan: practical, respected and familiar. 

Then another language called. 

A place in the Hindi-Urdu Flagship program at her university offered the chance to study language alongside her existing degree. Shaikh could already speak some Urdu, but had never learned to read the script. What began as curiosity soon deepened into conviction. 

That conviction was sharpened in India. During a study period there, she found herself immersed in the language—reading poetry at shrines and engaging more closely with the culture and history of her ancestors. What had started as an academic opportunity now felt personal, immediate and alive.  

She completed her Public Health degree but did not return to medicine. By then, the direction of travel had changed. Language, scholarship and teaching had taken hold. 

A World of Words 

Shaikh’s academic journey would go on to take her through some of the world’s most dynamic cities and institutions. 

At the University of Texas at Austin, she found a vibrant scholarly community that helped lay the foundations for advanced language study. A Master’s degree at Columbia University widened the frame further, exposing her to artists, curators and communities beyond the university. 

Then came Montreal and a PhD at McGill University, where the city itself became part of the education. French, Persian, Arabic and the everyday reality of multilingual life broadened her sense of how language shapes identity, belonging and exchange.  

Those experiences now shape the way she teaches: language not simply as grammar and vocabulary, but as something lived. 

Today, that path has brought her to the Australian National University School of Culture, History & Language, where she joins CHL as its new Hindi-Urdu Lecturer. 

Recovering Voices 

Alongside her teaching, Shaikh brings a research focus on some of the earliest women writing in Urdu—figures too often missing from mainstream literary histories. 

The names most commonly associated with Urdu poetry are familiar male giants. Yet women were writing too, even if their words were less frequently preserved, published or studied. Shaikh’s work helps redraw that literary map. 

Much of South Asian literature from earlier periods was written by men about women. Her research turns attention to what women wrote for themselves: their ideas, emotions and observations in their own voice.  

It is the kind of scholarship that reflects CHL’s wider strengths—using language study to uncover histories, challenge assumptions and bring overlooked stories back into view. 

More Than Grammar 

Shaikh is equally animated by what happens in the classroom. 

She teaches Hindi and Urdu not as sharply divided languages, but as deeply connected traditions whose grammar and much spoken vocabulary remain closely shared, even as their scripts diverge. For students, the approach offers not only linguistic insight, but a more nuanced understanding of the cultural and political histories of South Asia.  

Her classes are designed to be immersive and memorable. Lessons may begin with Bollywood songs tied to grammar themes. Festivals such as Holi, Eid, Nowruz and Diwali become opportunities to explore language through food, conversation and culture. In second-year courses, students take part in a weekly musha’ira, memorising and reciting poetry aloud.  

For Shaikh, language learning should carry joy as well as rigour. Students should leave not only with vocabulary and syntax, but with the confidence to speak, make mistakes and use Hindi-Urdu beyond the classroom—in travel, in community, and in everyday life. 

For students stepping into her classroom, the first lesson may be this: a new language can do more than open windows—it can teach them to read the world differently.