Sara Ahmed

Sara Ahmed (30 August 1969) is a British-Australian scholar whose area of study includes the intersection of feminist theory, queer theory, critical race theory and postcolonialism. 2Life Ahmed was born in Salford, England. She has a Pakistani father and English mother, and emigrated to Adelaide, Australia, with her family in the early 1970s. Key themes in her work, such as migration, orientation, difference, strangerness, and mixed identities, relate directly to some of these early experiences. She completed her first degree at Adelaide University and doctoral research at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University. Ahmed was based at the Institute for Women’s Studies at Lancaster University from 1994-2004, and is one of the former directors of the Institute. Ahmed was appointed to the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2004. She was the inaugural director of the Centre for Feminist Research there, which was set up 'to consolidate Goldsmiths' feminist histories and to help shape feminist futures at Goldsmiths.' Ahmed resigned from her post at Goldsmiths in 2016, in protest over the alleged sexual harassment of students by staff there. She has indicated that she will continue her work as an independent scholar from January 2017. Ahmed was the Laurie New Jersey Chair in Women’s Studies at Rutgers University in Spring 2009 and was the Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Professor in Gender Studies at Cambridge University in Lent 2013, where she conducted research on "Willful Women: Feminism and a History of Will