Profile
Biography
Claire Chambers is Professor of Global Literature at the University of York. After a PhD at the University of Leeds and eight years as a Senior Lecturer at Leeds Beckett University, she joined the Department of English and Related Literature as Lecturer in 2012. She was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2016 and to Professor in 2020. Her fascination with the literature of the Indian subcontinent and the ‘Muslim world’ was sparked by the year she spent as a teenager teaching in Mardan and Peshawar, Pakistan. It continues to be informed by return visits to the region and by language and literary study in both Hindi and Urdu (she has GCSE Urdu and is working towards her A level in the language). Claire is passionate about public engagement and doing schools work with diasporic communities.
Her latest edited volumes are an essay collection entitled Translation and Decolonisation: Interdisciplinary Approaches (with Ipek Demir) and an anthology of food writing from Muslim South Asia, entitled Forgotten Foods: Memories and Recipes from Muslim South Asia (with Siobhan Lambert-Hurley and Tarana Khan). This is the sequel to the well-known book titled Dastarkhwan in the UK and Desi Delicacies in India. Desi Delicacies is also available as an Audible audiobook.
Other books include Storying Relationships: Young British Muslims Speak and Write about Sex and Love (with Richard Phillips et al.), Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels, Rivers of Ink: Selected Essays, Britain Through Muslim Eyes: Literary Representations, 1780−1989, and British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers. She edited A Match Made in Heaven: British Muslim Women Write About Love and Desire (with Nafhesa Ali and Richard Phillips), and (with Caroline Herbert) Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora: Secularism, Religion, Representations.
Not only is she known for her research on literary representations of Muslims in Britain and South Asia but also on Indian writing in English, especially the Bengali writer Amitav Ghosh.
An emerging specialism is the medical humanities. Claire has recently submitted her next monograph entitled Decolonizing Disease: Pandemics, Public Health and Pathogenic Novels for publication in the Liverpool University Press series Representations: Health, Disability, Culture and Society in 2025 or early 2026. With Xiaohui Liang, she co-edited a special issue entitled ‘Prevailing Pandemic’ for Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 56(1), for which Dr Liang and Claire also wrote the Introduction and an article entitled ‘Pandemic Writing as an Ecological Force’.
Claire has published widely in such journals as Interventions, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Contemporary Women’s Writing, and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Claire was Editor-in-Chief of Literature, Critique, and Empire Today for over a decade. Her research has been supported by grants from HEFCE, the AHRC, ESRC, British Academy, and Leverhulme Trust. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Research
Overview
Claire is an expert in contemporary South Asian literature written in English and literary representations of British Muslims. Her monograph Britain Through Muslim Eyes offers a unique contribution by tracing the development of artistic depictions of Muslims in Britain from the eighteenth century to the present day. She then published its sequel, Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels, after a sabbatical generously supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship.
The first volume in this trilogy of books British Muslim Fictions is now in its second edition, having received positive reviews in the Times Literary Supplement and the Pakistani newspapers The Friday Times and Dawn, among other outlets.
Another book, co-edited with Caroline Herbert and entitled Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora: Secularism, Religion, Representations, was published by Routledge in 2015.
Claire compiled a collection of her essays, entitled Rivers of Ink, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2017.
Out of her AHRC-funded Storying Relationships project, she has co-authored several peer-reviewed articles, as well as Storying Relationships: Young British Muslims Speak and Write about Sex and Love (Zed, 2021) and A Match Made in Heaven: British Muslim Women Write About Love and Desire (HopeRoad, 2020).
From the AHRC-funded Forgotten Food project, she edited Desi Delicacies: Food Writing From Muslim South Asia (Picador India), which was published as Dastarkhwan in the UK and includes creative writing and narrative nonfiction from such authors as Aamer Hussein, Annie Zaidi, Rana Safvi, Sanam Maher, and Uzma Aslam Khan.
Claire’s new co-edited volume Translation and Decolonisation: Interdisciplinary Approaches opens with a classic essay by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and ends with one by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. In between are 11 original essays including one written by Claire, entitled ‘Forked Tongues: Translation and (De)colonisation in Two Global Novels by Contemporary Women Writers’, about R. F. Kuang’s Babel and Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi’s The Centre.
Supervision
Claire has extensive mentorship experience, having supervised to completion 20 PhD theses on South Asian, postcolonial, and British migrant literature, and acted as a Thesis Advisory Panel member for six students, including one from the Politics department. She has externally examined 28 PhD theses and 1 MA by Research at universities in the UK and overseas, and has acted as the internal examiner or chair for 11 doctoral examinations. She is currently supervising seven PhD students, five of them working towards the PhD in English with Creative Writing, and one postdoc, Dr Neelum Almas (COMSATS, Islamabad). Claire welcomes postgraduate researchers interested in many areas of contemporary writing, especially topics related to fiction from South Asia and its diaspora in English, Hindi, and Urdu. Her supervisees’ completed topics have included:
- depictions of Muslims in contemporary British fiction
- contemporary Anglophone Irish and Indian women poets
- Sri Lanka and fine art
- Chinese American women’s writing
- womanhood in Botswana
- representation of motherhood in Indian women’s writing
- mystic modernity: Yeats and Tagore
- the politics of offence in Hara Kiri and Charlie Hebdo
- fictional encounters with Rumi in Turkish novels
- gender and space in the Saudi woman’s novel
- mute speech in Urdu short fiction
- late style in J. M. Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy
- same-sex desiring women in Indian life writing
- writing the Muslim terrorist
- twenty-first century dystopian Arabic and Muslim South Asian fiction
- representations of ISIS/Daesh in fiction, television, and films
- interrogating world literature: contemporary Anglophone Pakistani fiction and the global marketplace
- queerness and coming of age in Indian women’s writing
- how to become a refugee: a collection of short stories & critical commentary
- propagating queer resilience in 1920s British fiction
Teaching
Undergraduate
In her teaching, Claire is committed to intersectional feminist approaches, decolonizing the curriculum, and interdisciplinarity (especially with Sociology and Politics). She teaches a diverse range of undergraduate and postgraduate modules, which have at their heart issues of race, religion, gender, and social (in)equality. For example, she convenes the second-year world literature module ‘Muslim Translations of Britain’, in which 75% of the texts are in translation from Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. Her advanced option modules are ‘Decolonizing Disease: Pandemics, Public Health and Pathogenic Novels’ (about literature resisting colonialism and its legacies and thinking through issues around race, class, and gender, while also exploring public health crises and unequal access to medical care) and ‘Postcolonial Writing: Literature and Resistance’. The latter encompasses theories from Gandhi and Fanon to Barbara Harlow and Priyamvada Gopal, and creative texts from Ghassan Kanafani and Kamala Markandaya to books engaging with the Egyptian Revolution and online radicalism.
Postgraduate
At postgraduate level, Claire is actively involved in the MA in Global Literature and Culture, on which she teaches on the core module Debating Global Literary Culture and offers the option Imagining Muslims.
Having acted as Graduate Chair for English from 2017-2020, Claire has a wealth of experience of supervising postgraduates writing dissertations and theses on South Asian, postcolonial, and British migrant literatures. She welcomes MA and research students interested in a wide range of twentieth- and twenty-first century texts, especially topics related to fiction from South Asia and its diaspora, the ‘Muslim world’, and multicultural Britain.
External activities
Memberships
2008, continuing: Associate Member, Centre for Research into Diversity in the Professions, Leeds Beckett; Member, then Vice-Chair (2011−14), Postcolonial Studies Association (PSA)
2011-14: Vice-Chair, Postcolonial Studies Association (PSA)
2020, continuing: Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts (RSA)
External Activity
Claire was Editor-in-Chief for eleven years (2010-2021) of the Literature, Critique, and Empire Today, the leading critical and bibliographic forum in the field of Commonwealth and postcolonial literatures. She is on many advisory boards including those of Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture, NUML: Journal of Critical Inquiry, and the Rodopi book series Postcolonial Lives.
She was a Co-Investigator for Forgotten Food: Culinary Memory, Local Heritage and Lost Agricultural Varieties in India, a Cultures, Behaviours and Histories of Agriculture, Food, and Nutrition (AHRC-GCRF)-funded project. The Principal Investigator was Siobhan Lambert-Hurley of the University of Sheffield. Claire’s role in this project was to commission and edit a new anthology of creative writing. Entitled Desi Delicacies (Picador, 2021) and Dastarkhwan, the stories and life writing essays collected in this book deal with South Asian food and foodways to capture memories and ideas relating to such themes as family, domesticity, feasting, and lack of food. This was followed by a more expansive co-edited anthology, Forgotten Foods: Memories and Recipes from Muslim South Asia (Picador, 2023; with Siobhan Lambert-Hurley and Tarana Khan).
Claire was also Co-Investigator on Advancing Female Literacy and Empowerment in Pakistan and India through Life Writing, a Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF)-funded project. The Principal Investigator was again Siobhan Lambert-Hurley of the University of Sheffield, from where the project was run until 2020. Taking a cue from Malala Yousafzai’s work, the Advancing Female Literacy and Empowerment project used historical research linked to women’s life writing to improve female literacy and empowerment in Pakistan and India.
Until 2019 Claire was Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded project, Storying Relationships (Principal Investigator: Professor Richard Phillips).
Previously, she was a member of the AHRC’s Peer Review College, Vice Chair of the Postcolonial Studies Association and worked as a subject editor for the ‘Indian Subcontinent and Sri Lanka’ section of The Year’s Work in English Studies.
She was also awarded an ESRC Impact Acceleration Award for her project Leeds Meets Shakespeare, in partnership with Sarah Olive (Education), Leeds City Council Children’s Services, Artforms, the Leeds Playhouse, Tribe Arts, and Globe Education.
In addition to being one of Times Higher Education’s scholar-reviewers and a blogger on culture for the Huffington Post, she writes book reviews for such journals as C21, Wasafiri, Contemporary South Asia, Feminist Theory, and Moving Worlds. She is a literary columnist for Dawn and 3 Quarks Daily.
She was a Project Partner in Muslims, Trust and Cultural Dialogue, an international multidisciplinary network of scholars, practitioners and stakeholders, which sought to explore questions of trust in the relationship between Muslim diaspora populations in the West and the societies around them.
She co-edits two book series: Global Textualities: Multicultural and Transcultural Narratives (Manchester University Press) and Global Literature: Twenty-First Century Perspectives (Routledge). With Kaiser Haq, she edits the Bloomsbury Cultural History of South Asian Literature series, for which Kaiser and Claire are also the editors for Volume 6: The Modern Age (1900 CE–Present).
Claire wrote an Impact Case Study entitled Writing by Muslims in South Asia and the British Diaspora for REF 2021. She regularly participates in literature festivals such as those at Ilkley, Karachi, and Bradford. In 2014, Claire contributed to the Radio 4 documentary First There Was the Word, about Muslims and publishing in Britain. This contributed to her being invited to become a Committee Member of the HopeRoad Project, an initiative around diversity and traineeships in publishing. On 18 December 2015, a half-hour interview with Claire about her research on early Muslim travellers to Britain was broadcast on British Muslim TV, repeated on 7 January 2016. She has also spoken on Radio Asian Fever, BBC Radio Manchester, BBC Radio Leeds, BBC Radio Derby, BBC Radio West Midlands, Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, among other outlets.
Some of her work on Abdulrazak Gurnah was listed in the ‘Further Reading’ section of the Biobliography on the Nobel Prize website. When she thinks of it, she might post something on BlueSky @clarachambara.bsky.social/.
