Claire Chambers

Research Database

Claire Chambers is a Senior Lecturer at the University of York, where she researches and teaches literature from South Asia, the Arab world, and their diasporas.

She is the author of the academic trilogy British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Britain Through Muslim Eyes: Literary Representations, 1780−1988 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); and Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

The first book is a collection of thirteen interviews by authors of Muslim heritage from Tariq Ali and Hanif Kureishi to Kamila Shamsie, Tahmima Anam, and Mohsin Hamid. The second is a literary history of Muslim writing in Britain from the eighteenth century to Salman Rushdie’s publication of The Satanic Verses. The final volume reads contemporary British Muslim novels through the lens of sensory studies, with chapters on touch, smell, taste, listening, and the posthuman senses.

She has also published a collection of her essays for Dawn (the longest-running Pakistani newspaper) and other outlets, entitled Rivers of Ink: Selected Essays (Oxford University Press, 2017). Finally, she has co-edited two collections: Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora (Routledge, 2015) and A Match Made in Heaven: British Muslim Women Write About Love and Desire (HopeRoad, 2020; forthcoming).

Her research has been supported by funding from HEFCE, the ESRC, the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, and the AHRC. She publishes widely in such journals as Humanities, Postcolonial Text, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Contemporary Women’s Writing. Claire is also Co-Editor of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and a Series Editor for two book series: Global Literature: Twenty-First Century Perspectives (Routledge) and Multicultural Textualities (Manchester University Press).