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 writing. The book excavates legacies of disavowed cosmopolitan thinking and alliance-making entangled within the creative and theoretical history of black British studies, more generally. The second project is based on years of archival work around the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush in 1948. Using archival documents, this research traces a more complicated, global history of the ship through new materialist approaches. This project has been supported by two funding bodies: a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Development Grant (2021-2023) and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2024-2025). The third book, which draws on my Windrush research and is in its early stages, engages with immigration law, notions of documentality and experimental global migration literatures.

I am also a Board Member 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
• Windrush Writing
• Documentality
• 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

Edited book

• Saroukhani, H., & McLeod, J. (Eds.). (2023). Windrush: Writing the Scandal [Special Issue: Wasafiri: International Contemporary Writing, 38 (2)]. Taylor and Francis
• Saroukhani, H., Lawson Welsh, S., & Perfect, M. (Eds.). (2022). Andrea Levy, In Memoriam [Special Double Issue: ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 53 (1-2)]. Johns Hopkins University Press

Journal Article

• 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., 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., & McLeod, J. (2023). A Loss of Innocence. Wasafiri, 38(2), 1-3. https://doi.org/10.1080/02690055.2023.2171610
• 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. https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0001
• 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. (2021). Empire, Race, and the Autotheoretical Impulse. Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings, 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. Études anglaises, 70(1), 11-27. 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

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

• Saroukhani, H. (2023). Unravelling the Windrush myth: the confidential government communications that reveal authorities did not want Caribbean migrants to come to Britain. [https://theconversation.com/unravelling-the-windrush-myth-the-confidential-government-communications-that-reveal-authorities-did-not-want-caribbean-migrants-to-come-to-britain-206225]. The Conversation
• Saroukhani, H. (2020). Caryl Phillips, The Lost Child. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=38879]. The Literary Encyclopedia
• Saroukhani, H. (2020). Bernardine Evaristo, Soul Tourists. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=35686]. The Literary Encyclopedia