Sara Ahmed

British-Australian independent scholar and author (* 30 August 1969). Her works center feminist and queer theory, lesbian feminism, affect studies, postcolonialism, and Black British feminism. She is also a self-proclaimed "feminist killjoy". Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Heidi Mirza, Judith Butler, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, among others, influenced and continue to influence her scholarly writing.

Life and Education

Ahmed was born in Salford, England. She is of Pakistani and English descent, with a Pakistani father working as a doctor, and an English mother. Ahmed grew up in Adelaide, Australia after her parents moved there in the 1970s. She received her first degree in English, philosophy, and history from the University of Adelaide in 1989. In 1991, she returned to the UK to complete her doctorate (awarded in 1995) at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University.

She currently lives in the environs of a small village in Cambridgeshire, England, with her partner Sarah Franklin and their two dogs, Poppy and Bluebell.

Career

In 1994, Ahmed began working as a lecturer in Women’s Studies at Lancaster University. There, she eventually became director of Women’s Studies. She remained there until 2004, when she was elected to the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London. After a year of working as a reader in Race and Cultural Studies, she was elected to the Professorship of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths. From 2013 to 2016, she was also director of the Centre for Feminist Research, which she called a "lifeline and a shelter [...] not populated by the same old bodies" in her resignation blog post at Goldsmiths. Throughout her career, she also had visiting appointments at Cambridge University, Rutgers University, University of Sydney, and University of Adelaide.

In 2016, she resigned from her position as Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths in solidarity with the students who filed sexual harassment claims against other members of staff there. She wrote a blog post titled "Resignation" and further explained her decision to resign in protest against Goldsmiths’ failure to adequately address the issue, stating: "Resignation is a feminist issue". She now works as an independent scholar and researcher and continues to publish books and articles and occasionally lectures.

Her work is very much connected to her own struggles as a queer person of color. The term feminist killjoy is a reference to pervasive and harmful cultural tropes such as the "angry Black woman" or the "unhappy queer". In calling herself a feminist killjoy, she wants to deconstruct Western notions of normative happiness as the ultimate goal in life and highlight the figures that interrupt such narratives. Her books titled The Promise of Happiness (2010), Living a Feminist Life (2017), and The Feminist Killjoy Handbook (2023) work through this in more detail.

Selected Works

Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (1998)
Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (2000)
The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004)
Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006)
The Promise of Happiness (2010)
On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012)
Willful Subjects (2014)
Living a Feminist Life (2017)
What’s the Use? (2019)
Complaint! (2021)
The Feminist Killjoy Handbook (2023)
No Is Not a Lonely Utterance (forthcoming)

Social Media

As a self-proclaimed independent feminist scholar and writer, Ahmed regularly uses multiple social media platforms to blog and publish her thoughts on contemporary issues. Her Substack handle is @feministkilljoys — a nod to her research blog (feministkilljoys.com) titled feministkilljoys. She also has a personal website (saranahmed.com) with links to her articles, latest projects, upcoming lectures, and CV. You can also find her on Instagram (@feministkilljoyatwork) where she shares some of the behind-the-scenes of her scholarly work.

Accolades

Feminist and Women’s Studies Network (FWSA) Book Prize 2012, The Promise of Happiness for "ingenuity and scholarship in the fields of feminism, gender or women’s studies."
Phenomenology Roundtable Award 2010 for "outstanding contribution to the field of phenomenological research".

Sources

Ahmed, Sara. "Bio." Sara Ahmed, www.saranahmed.com/bio-cv. Accessed 19 Jan. 2025.
- - -. "feministkilljoys." Feministkilljoys, feministkilljoys.com. Accessed 19 Jan. 2025.
- - -. "Resignation." Feministkilljoys, feministkilljoys.com/2016/05/30/resignation/. Accessed 19 Jan. 2025.
Ahmed, Sara, and Katy P. Sian. "Sara Ahmed." Conversations in Postcolonial Thought, edited by Katy P. Sian, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 15-34.
Binyam, Maya. "You Pose a Problem: A Conversation with Sara Ahmed." The Paris Review, 19 Jan. 2022, www.theparisreview.org/blog/2022/01/14/you-pose-a-problem-a-conversation-with-sara-ahmed/. Accessed 21 Jan. 2025.
Mehra, Nishta J. "Sara Ahmed: Notes from a Feminist Killjoy." Guernica, 31 July 2017, www.guernicamag.com/sara-ahmed-the-personal-is-institutional/. Accessed 20 Jan. 2025.