In addition to critical essays on a number of late-19th to 21st-century authors, Dr.
Najmi’s scholarly publications include Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature (U of Washington P, 2005), coedited with Zhou Xiaojing; White Women in Racialized Spaces (SUNY, 2002), coedited with Rajini Srikanth, and Critical Perspectives on Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: Feminism and Diaspora (Lexington, 2022), coedited with Amritjit Singh and Robin Field. She proposed the
reissue of The Heart of Hyacinth (U of Washington P, 2000) by Onoto Watanna, Asian America's earliest known novelist.
In recent years Dr. Najmi's research has focused on war narratives and post-9/11 literature.
Her essay, "Narrating War: Arab and Muslim American Aesthetics"--on the writings of
Suheir Hammad, Naomi Shihab Nye, Wafaa Bilal, Mohsin Hamid, and H.M. Naqvi--appears
in The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature (2015), edited by Rajini Srikanth and Min Song. Dr. Najmi was among twenty-one writers
nationwide to contribute an address on the state and future of Asian American literature
for the twentieth anniversary of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in
2017.
