Dr Sarah Jilani is a Lecturer in English at City, University of London, who teaches Anglophone postcolonial literatures and world film on a number of BA and MA modules with a particular focus on race, gender, and the legacies of colonialism. As a freelance writer on contemporary art, books and film, she regularly contributes to The Economist, The Times Literary Supplement and ArtReview amongst others, and appears on BBC Radio 3 as a 2021 BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker.
After studying for a BA English at the University of York and an MSt in English at the University of Oxford, Sarah worked in digital strategy and journalism in London. In 2017 she joined the University of Cambridge as a PhD candidate in the Faculty of English, jointly funded by the AHRC and the Isaac Newton Trust. Supervised by Professor Priyamvada Gopal, her doctoral thesis studied how post-independence (1950s-80s) novels and films from Africa and South Asia help us understand subjectivity as politically important to the project of decolonisation.
Sarah's research interests include subjectivity, gender and political consciousness in postcolonial theory, literatures and film; she has published on a range of related topics, from neocolonialism in Francophone West African cinema to women's writing about the Nigerian Civil War. A monograph based on her doctoral thesis is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press in 2023.