Farha Noor is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Graduate School Global Intellectual History, Freie Universität Berlin. She received her doctoral degree from the Department of Modern South Asian Languages and Literatures at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University. Her research interests include South Asian history, literary and cultural studies, Colonial Modernity, Intellectual History, History of Emotions, Postcolonial Environment Studies, Genre Fictions (Horror and the Uncanny, Science Fiction) and Gender Studies.

Her book Leisurely Feelings: Emotions and Concepts of Otium in South Asia was published with Open Access in 2024 by Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing.

Her related research analyses the transformation of concepts and ideas like leisureliness, boredom, melancholy and haunting in the framework of colonial modernity across South Asian languages and literatures, focusing on Bengali and Urdu and includes Hindi and English historical and literary sources across colonial and postcolonial South Asia. Analysing transformations and entanglements in narratives of the uncanny and human and nonhuman emotions, she is currently working on a project on the history of haunting in modern/colonial South Asia. The project aims to create an interactive website that contributes towards a public history of haunting across the northern part of the subcontinent.

Farha Noor’s doctoral project was supported by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) through the Collaborative Research Cluster 1015 “Muße”. She attended the History of Concepts Summer School in Helsinki and was invited to teach later at the conceptual history summer schools, Introduction to the History of Concepts at Helsinki University and Entangled Histories of Concepts in the Bengal to Balkans Complex at Orient Institute Istanbul. Noor has taught courses on British and New English Literatures, Ecocriticism and Science Fiction, Postcolonial Literary Histories and British Horror and Empire at the Department of English Studies at Rheinland-Pfälzische Technische Universität Landau, and at University College Freiburg (Liberal Arts and Sciences Programme).

She holds a PhD in Modern South Asian Languages and Literatures from Heidelberg University, an MA and an MPhil. degree in English Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

Recent publications include:

Monograph:

Farha Noor, Leisurely Feelings: Emotions and Concepts of Otium in South Asia. Heidelberg: Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing, 2024. https://doi.org/10.11588/hasp.1348

Articles:

“Negotiating nostalgia: progressive women´s memoirs in Urdu”, South Asian History and Culture, 2020.

“The Sensory Semantics of Otium in South Asia: Asymmetries, Entanglements and the Affective.” Semantiken der Muße aus interdisziplinärer Perspektive. Eds. Monika Fludernik and Thomas Jürgasch. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021.

“The 1939 Calcutta Diary of Judhha Shamsher of Nepal: Ego Document, Diplomacy and Emotions”, Zeitschrift für Indologie und Südasienstudien. 41. Eds. Hans Harder and Ute Hüsken. 96-223. (In print)

“Boredom, Enchantment and Colonial Modernity: An Entangled History of Boredom in South Asia”, International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity (Special Theme Issue), 2025 (Forthcoming).

“Of Other Islands and New Worlds: Archipelagic Departures in Satyajit Ray’s Postcolonial Science Fiction”, Archipelagic Memory, Island Indias. Eds. Ananya Kabir, Luca Raimondi and Sandrine Soukaï. Leiden: Brill, 2026 (Forthcoming).