Nazia Akhtar teaches courses in Indian and Russian literatures at the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad. In 2017, she was awarded a New India Foundation fellowship to write a book on Urdu prose by Hyderabadi women which was recently published as Bibi’s Room: Hyderabadi Women and Twentieth-Century Urdu Prose (2022). She has recently received a commendation from the jury of the Jawad Memorial Prize (2021) for her translation of Zeenath Sajida’s Urdu short story “Chhotam Jaan.” She is currently translating more Urdu writings of Hyderabadi women and conducting research on literary representations of the transfer of power as it affected Hyderabad.