Nyla Ali Khan is an adjunct professor at Oklahoma City Community College. She is a former Visiting Professor at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, and former Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska-Kearney. She is the author of four books, and several articles that focus on the political issues and strife of her homeland, Jammu and Kashmir, India. She is the granddaughter of Sheikh Abdullah. Biography Khan was born in New Delhi, India. Her family is based in Jammu and Kashmir, India, and she was raised there in the Kashmir Valley located in the foothills of the Himalayas. Her mother, Suraiya Abdullah Ali, is a retired professor of literature, and her father, Mohammad Ali Matto, was a retired physician. She is the only child of Suraiya Abdullah Ali and Mohammad Ali Matto—and the granddaughter of Sheikh Abdullah. As per her grandfather's biography, her great great grandfather was a Sapru Brahmin who converted to Islam in the 19th century. She did her master's degree in English at the University of Oklahoma, focusing on postcolonial literature and theory and obtained her Ph.D. at the same institution. In May 2015, Khan was the first Kashmiri woman to be nominated and accepted as a member of the advisory council for the Oklahoma Commission on the Status of Women. The council serves "as a resource and clearinghouse for research and information on issues related to women and gender bias, to act as an advisory entity on equity issues to state agencies, communities, organizations and businesses of the state, and to establish recommendations for action to improve the quality of life for Oklahoma women, children and families." Nyla Khan prefers not simply to live in his shadow but to "stand up for myself and be taken seriously ... express my anger without being labeled an 'Islamic militant' ... [and] legitimately question things I don't understand", as she stated in a 2010 interview related to the release of her second book. Publications Books In her first book, The Fiction of Nationality in an Era of Transnationalism, she "examines the writings of V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Anita Desai, all four living abroad to explain the aberrant behaviour of emigres from the Indian subcontinent to explain why they support religious fundamentalist groups in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh." In doing so, she strives to provide an objective view of how transnationalism can distort impressions of reality. In