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.