University of York
Claire Chambers is Professor of Global Literature at the University of York. She joined the Department of English and Related Literature as Lecturer in 2012, following eight years as a Senior Lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and a PhD at the University of Leeds. 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 prior to university teaching in Mardan and Peshawar, Pakistan. It continues to be informed by return visits to the region, and by knowledge exchange and schools work with diasporic communities.
Her latest edited volume is an anthology of food writing from Muslim South Asia, entitled Dastarkhwan in the UK (Beacon Books, 2021) and Desi Delicacies in India (Picador, 2021). Other books include Storying Relationships: Young British Muslims Speak and Write about Sex and Love (with Richard Phillips et al., Zed, 2021), Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Rivers of Ink: Selected Essays (OUP, 2017), Britain Through Muslim Eyes: Literary Representations, 1780−1989 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). She edited A Match Made in Heaven: British Muslim Women Write About Love and Desire (with Nafhesa Ali and Richard Phillips, HopeRoad, 2020), and (with Caroline Herbert) Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora: Secularism, Religion, Representations (Routledge, 2015).
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 Chinese literature. She 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 the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, which she edited 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.
(Source: University of York)
Contact: claire.chambers@york.ac.uk