Mustafa Menai

Mustafa Menai is Lecturer of Urdu at the University of Pennsylvania South Asia Studies Department. After serving in strategic positions in the international and domestic non-profit education sector for over a decade, he conducted research in the areas of instructional planning, curriculum and assessment design at Mathematica Policy Research. He has been serving as a reviewer and consultant for the Defense Languages Institute. His research interest is focused on the history of Hindi-Urdu education, curriculum development and teacher training in South Asia. He is also interested in the pedagogy of teaching language through literature, and experimenting with different poetic structures such as ghazal, nazm and haiku. His teaching and research work is supported by an M.A. in International Education Development from Columbia University, and PhD studies (ongoing) in South Asia Regional Studies and Education at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also a certified Startalk, ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) and ILR (Interagency Language Roundtable) Foreign Language Instructor.