Dr. Leila Essa

Biography

Leila Essa is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. Her current research project, 'Intention & Intervention', funded by a Veni grant from the Dutch Research Council, examines authorial strategies and exclusionary discourses in Germany and Britain. Essa actively contributes to public discourse through a research blog and has written for platforms such as Die Zeit and the Berlin Review. She is an author and judge of the Kurt-Tucholsky-Preis for politically engaged writing in small forms, and her academic work has been featured in journals like Comparative Literature Studies. Essa is currently co-editing a volume titled 'Activist Writing / Activist Reading' with Marta Cenedese, which is under contract with Bloomsbury Academic. Her forthcoming book, 'Partitioned Nations, Shared Narratives', received the Women in German Studies Book Prize, and she is also preparing monographs. She holds degrees in comparative literary studies from King’s College London (BA, 2014; PhD, 2020) and the University of Cambridge (MPhil, 2015). Her doctoral research involved extensive study visits to Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. Leila's teaching focuses on literatures of migration and diaspora in the BA Literary Studies program and contemporary publishing in the MA Literature program at Utrecht University. She welcomes inquiries from prospective PhD students and serves as a member of the Editorial Board for Forum Modern Language Studies and the Advisory Board for FRAME Journal of Literary Studies.

Research Interests

Experience

Awards