Dr Sarah Jilani is a Lecturer in English at City, University of London who teaches Anglophone postcolonial literatures and film from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. 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 4 as a 2021 BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker.

Sarah’s research interests include literary and cinematic explorations of subjectivity, racialisation, political consciousness, and anti-colonial resistance. She also has secondary interests in liberation psychology; the aesthetics of Third World Marxisms; and narrative representations of Southern urbanism. She has published on a range of related topics, from neocolonialism in West African cinema to Frantz Fanon’s psycho-politics. Her monograph Subjectivity and Decolonisation in the Post-Independence Novel and Film (2024) is available from Edinburgh University Press.

Experienced, as part of her freelance journalism, in working with magazine editors, artists, galleries, and film curators, she welcomes contact from researchers and industry practitioners interested in exploring opportunities for collaboration.

Sarah was born and raised in Istanbul, and holds degrees in English from the universities of York (BA, 2012), Oxford (MSt, 2013) and Cambridge (PhD, 2021).