BIO

Credentials

BA (IAU), MA (IAU), MA (SFU)

Saba Pakdel is a poet, modernist scholar, and PhD candidate in the English department at University of Victoria. She completed her BA and MA in English language and literature in Iran. She earned her second MA in English at Simon Fraser University in 2021.

Saba specializes in migration studies and contemporary literature with a focus on exile, refugee, and immigration problems, particularly in works of migrant authors from the Global South. Her research addresses the identity formation of migrants away from Euro-centric formulations based in twentieth century ideas about migration. She works on literary creations that provide new ways of thinking about enforced migration just as climate catastrophe threatens to escalate migration on a global scale.

Saba has published two poetry chapbooks: In-Between (2022) and Un-Composed (2024) by above / ground press. She has attended and coordinated literary workshops and poetry readings; published poems, translations, and essays; and collaborated in stage plays as a playwright and backstage filmmaker. For a while, she worked as an editorial assistant at Talonbooks Publishing in Vancouver. Photography is her occasional and non-verbal means of communication with the world.

Phot Credit: Louise Major (UVic Communications)

Photo by Louise Major (UVic Communications)

"Dipping and diving from James Joyce’s Ulysses to contemporary Persian verse, and across visual, plastic, and verbal arts, Saba Pakdel possesses a restless mind in the very best sense. Driven by a need not only to understand the world around her, Saba is likewise obsessed with communicating what she learns through multiple channels all at once—veering through photography and high theory, then on to dance and original verse seemingly without breaking a sweat. Contributing to contemporary culture on multiple fronts at once, Saba is a force to be reckoned with, and a highly promising scholar, poet, and thinker."

—Dr. Stephen Ross

(Saba's PhD Degree Mentor and Supervisor at University of Victoria)

Photo by Saba Pakdel

"Saba Pakdel is a brilliant and passionate researcher, unlocking new understandings of the modernist trope of the author-exile -- redeployed for what it can (and cannot) tell us about contemporary figurations of the migrant, exile and refugee. Saba is asking whether the nation can still be figured as a necessarily absent object of desire when it comes to reading a contemporary literature of displacement that is still haunted by modernity's tropes of mobility, return, lost homelands, and imagined communities."

—Dr. Stephen Collis

(Saba's MA Degree Mentor and Supervisor at Simon Fraser University)