Rate My Professor Sara Upstone

Professor Sara Upstone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Faculty Director of Postgraduate Research at Kingston School of Art, Kingston University London. She holds a PhD in English Literature, an MA in English Literary Research, a BA in English Literature with History, and a Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education. She has worked at Kingston University since 2005 and has held key leadership roles including Head of the Department of Humanities, Head of the School of Arts, Culture and Communication, School Director of Learning and Teaching, Faculty Athena Swan Lead, and member of the Faculty EDI Committee. Chair of the Disability Network at Kingston University, her research centres on the politics of form in contemporary literature and its relationship to identity, with particular focus on race, spatial justice, and community. Her interests include utopian realism and the British novel's representation of race, magical realism and postcolonial fiction, spatial justice in contemporary reworkings of fairy-tale, the 'transglossic' form of the contemporary novel promoting radical empathy, and creative practice in autotheory and lyrical nonfiction informed by her identity as a working-class and disabled scholar.

Upstone has published extensively, authoring Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel (2009), British Asian Fiction: Twenty-First-Century Voices (2010), Literary Theory: A Complete Introduction (2017), Rethinking Race and Identity in Contemporary British Fiction (2017), and Against (2020). She co-edited Postcolonial Spaces: The Politics of Place in Contemporary Culture (2011), Researching and Representing Mobilities: Transdisciplinary Encounters (2014), Postmodern Literature and Race (2015), Community in Contemporary British Fiction: From Blair to Brexit (2022), and Hari Kunzru (2023). Her articles and book chapters address topics such as domesticity in magical-realist postcolonial fiction, representations in works by Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and Monica Ali, mobilities in postcolonial fiction, and motherhood in E.L. James's Fifty Shades trilogy. She serves as Series Editor for Twenty-First Century Voices, Manchester University Press, and on the Editorial Board of College English.