Staff profile

I joined the English Department in September 2022 after having taught at Saint Mary’s University in Canada as an Associate Professor in Black Atlantic Literatures and Cultures. I completed my PhD at the University of Leeds, supported by an international fully-funded research scholarship (FFIRS), and have previously taught at the University of British Columbia, University of Leeds and Manchester Metropolitan University.

I am currently working on three book-length projects. The first – near completion – is a monograph on the cosmopolitics of twenty-first-century black British literature and visual culture. The book excavates legacies of disavowed cosmopolitan thinking entangled within the creative and theoretical history of black British studies, more generally. The second project is based on my continuing archival work surrounding the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush in 1948. This research was awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant (2021-2023) and traces a global history of the ship through new materialist approaches. Lastly, I am in the early stages of a co-written book on immigration law, notions of documentality and experimental global migration literatures.

I am an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, and the Reviews Editor for the postcolonial journal ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature.

Supervision

I welcome inquiries from prospective PhD students who have an interest in any of the following areas:

• Black British and Black Atlantic Literatures and Cultures
• Literatures of Migration
• Cosmopolitanism
• New Materialisms
• Autotheory
• Dub and Performance Poetry

Chapter in book

• Saroukhani, H. (2020). Sonic Solidarities: The Dissenting Voices of Dub. In S. Nasta, & M. Stein (Eds.), The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing (313-328). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108164146.021
• Saroukhani, H. (2018). Black British Writing: From Gulags to Ships. In E. Pollard, & B. Schoene (Eds.), British Literature in Transition, 1980-2000: Accelerated Times (115-130). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316344071.010

Journal Article

• Saroukhani, H., & McLeod, J. (2023). A Loss of Innocence. https://doi.org/10.1080/02690055.2023.2171610
• Saroukhani, H., Lawson Welsh, S., & Perfect, M. (2023). The Death of an Author. ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 54(1), 131-134. https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2023.0005
• Saroukhani, H. (2023). Hazel V Carby In Conversation: 'You Cannot Accept Their Terms'. Wasafiri, 38(2), 68-73. https://doi.org/10.1080/02690055.2023.2170565
• Saroukhani, H. (2022). A Hostile Environment: The Conflicted Cosmopolitics of Andrea Levy’s Small Island. ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 53(1-2), 109-137. https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0005
• Saroukhani, H., Lawson Welsh, S., & Perfect, M. (2022). Afterlives, Aftermaths: Levy Studies in the Twenty-First Century. ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 53(1-2), 7-24
• Saroukhani, H. (2021). Empire, Race, and the Autotheoretical Impulse. Moving worlds (Leeds), 20(2), 21-35
• Saroukhani, H. (2018). Black British Soldiers in Northern Ireland: Martin Stellman’s For Queen and Country and Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game. Caribbean Quarterly, 64(3-4), 544-559. https://doi.org/10.1080/00086495.2018.1531562
• Saroukhani, H. (2017). Vehicular Cosmopolitanism: The Car in Bernardine Evaristo’s Soul Tourists. https://doi.org/10.3917/etan.701.0011
• Saroukhani, H. (2015). Penguinizing dub: Paratextual frames for transnational protest in Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Mi Revalueshanary Fren. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 51(3), 256-268. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2014.977493