The Cultural Politics of Emotion

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to sexual assault, homophobia, racism, and war.

Sara Ahmed is a feminist scholar and writer with a long and prestigious academic career. She has served as Director of the Institute for Women’s Studies at Lancaster University and Director of the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths College. She has held both the Rutgers University Laurie New Jersey Chair in Women’s Studies and the Cambridge University Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Professorship in Gender Studies. Scholars have praised her many publications for their consistently high quality, and several, such as The Cultural Politics of Emotion and The Promise of Happiness, are considered landmark texts in the fields of affect, queer, and feminist theory. Ahmed received the Kessler Award from the City University of New York in recognition of her contributions to LGBTQ+ studies. In 2016, however, Ahmed resigned her final academic post at Goldsmiths College, citing the institution’s entrenched culture of sexual harassment. She has elected not to return to academia, finding its structures incompatible with the work of feminism as she chooses to do it.

Since leaving Goldsmiths, Ahmed has steadily worked to connect with more general audiences. More recent books like Complaint! are aimed at readers both inside and outside of academia, and Ahmed has become popularly known as the creator of the figure of the “Feminist Killjoy.