Dr Sarah Ilott
Co-Lead of the Centre for Migration and Postcolonial Studies, Senior Lecturer in English and Film
Author of New Postcolonial British Genres. Now researching British multiculturalism in screen comedy.
My profile
Biography
Dr Sarah Ilott is Senior Lecturer in English and Film. She is currently writing a book on Screening Multicultural Britain: Race, Racism and British Comedy, forthcoming with Palgrave in 2023. She is co-lead of the Centre for Migration and Postcolonial Studies (MAPS) at Manchester Met and a member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies (MCGS). Externally, she is on the organising team of the comedy and gender research network ‘Mixed Bill’ and a member of the Postcolonial Studies Association. Her research and teaching interests are in postcolonialism and popular literature and culture, with particular expertise in comedy and the gothic. Her main publications include New Postcolonial British Genres: Shifting the Boundaries (Palgrave, 2015), Telling it Slant: Critical Approaches to Helen Oyeyemi (edited with Chloe Buckley; Sussex Academic Press, 2017) New Directions in Diaspora Studies (edited with Ana Cristina Mendes and Lucinda Newns, Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), and Comedy and the Politics of Representation: Mocking the Weak (edited with Helen Davies; Palgrave 2018). Sarah is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and the Departmental Lead for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.
Interests and expertise
As a postcolonialist, my love of researching popular cultural forms such as comedy and the gothic stems from a desire to open up important debates around national identity, systemic racism and structural inequality beyond academia. As such, I am experienced in running events and courses for a public audience. In the past this has included introducing public film screenings, Q&As with directors such as Gurinder Chadha and Ian Iqbal Rashid, and an eight week course on ‘Women in Screen Comedy’ run in partnership with HOME Cinema, Manchester. My expertise in comedy and race/racism has also led to multiple media appearances in interviews and position pieces for ABC (Australia), Morgenbladet (Norway), Chortle, The Conversation, Black History Lancaster and the BBC (UK) in relation to particular controversies or to racist comedy more broadly.
Teaching
I am interested in supervising doctoral projects on any aspect of postcolonial British literature or culture. I would also welcome applications for doctoral dissertations on the subjects of postcolonial gothic or comedy and the politics of representation. Please see below for details of the doctoral projects I am currently supervising.
CURRENT TEACHING
My teaching is rooted in a sincere belief in the need to decolonise the curriculum, so this is always central to the design and delivery of my units.
Postgraduate (MA):
I currently contribute to the MA English unit Narrating the Nation and the MA Creative Writing unit Reading Novels 2 and supervise MA dissertations.
Undergraduate (BA):
I currently lead the 2nd-year unit Writing After the British Empire. I also teach on the 1st-year unit Approaches to Narrative, the 2nd-year unit Postwar British Literature and Culture, and the 3rd-year unit Texting Britain, Texting the World. I am supervising undergraduate dissertations on a variety of topics, including literary and screen-based studies.
Supervision
I am currently co-supervising the following PhD projects:
Meriem Bochra Dermach Novels of Bernardine Evaristo
Chukwunonso Ezeiyoke West African Speculative Fiction
Sarra Grendi Cosmopolitanism and the Algerian Diaspora in France
Oliver Rendle Cosmic Humour and Contemporary Pessimism
Ali Shannon Middle Eastern Gothic
I have previously supervised the following PhD projects:
Robyn Ollett New Queer Gothic
Research outputs
My research is driven by a desire to interrogate the ways in which popular literature and culture serve to challenge or reproduce racialised systemic inequalities. I have explored this previously through research on postcolonial gothic across many national contexts, in both literature and film. I am particularly interested in the ways in which it is helpful to consider Britain as a postcolonial nation due to the ways in which British peoples, historical legacies and national imaginings are shaped by its former colonial relationships, and the way that this plays out in literature and culture. This was the subject of my first monograph, New Postcolonial British Genres (2015), as I explored the ways in which four genres (Muslim Bildungsromane, gothic, comedy, and subcultural fiction) evolved to accommodate and negotiate shifting notions of national identity since the 1990s.
In my current research I focus my attention on screen comedy as one of the most popular and widely consumed means of engaging with British multiculturalism. My latest monograph project, Screening Multicultural Britain: Race, Racism and British Comedy (forthcoming 2023) identifies, analyses and critiques the ways in which screen comedy from 1958 to the present has functioned as a crucible for debates over British multiculturalism. It demonstrates how popular ideas about the functioning and management of ethno-cultural diversity in Britain have been engaged through comedy that, by virtue of the medium’s ambivalent power to entrench, expose and subvert, variously supports or challenges dominant political discourses. I argue that screen comedies can be read as counter-narratives on British multiculturalism, exposing the tacit (and often racist) assumptions of multicultural discourse, namely that particular crimes are racialised; that interethnic romance spells hope for the future; that the black neighbour is inherently threatening; that ‘British values’ are threatened by ethnic and cultural minorities; that Britain is postracial and/or colourblind, and so on.
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Books (authored/edited/special issues)
Davies, H., Ilott, S. (2018) Comedy and the Politics of Representation Mocking the Weak. Palgrave Macmillan.
Ilott, S., Mendes, A.C., Newns, L. (2018) New Directions in Diaspora Studies Cultural and Literary Approaches. Rowman & Littlefield International.
Ilott, S. (2017) “Telling it Slant”: Critical Approaches to Helen Oyeyemi. Sussex Academic Press.
Ilott, S. (2015) New postcolonial British genres: Shifting the boundaries.
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Chapters in books
Ilott, S.E. 'Gothic Immigrations: Kentish Gothic and the Borders of Britishness.' Gothic Britain: Dark Places in the Provinces and Margins of the British Isles. University of Wales Press,
Ilott, S.E. 'Subcultural Fiction and the Market for Multiculturalism.' Popular Postcolonialisms: Discourses of Empire and Popular Culture. Routledge,
Ilott, S.E. 'Screening Multicultural Britain: Blair and British Asian Comedy.' Histories on Screen: The Past and Present in Anglo-American Cinema and Television. Bloomsbury Academic,
Ilott, S. (2021) 'Gothic Multiculturalism.' The Cambridge History of the Gothic: Volume 3, Gothic in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries Volume 3: Gothic in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Cambridge University Press,
Ilott, S. (2020) 'Racism that Grins: Gothic Realism and Systemic Critique.' Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror. Ohio State University Press,
Ilott, S. (2020) 'Zadie Smith’s Narratives of the Absurd: a Social Vision Represented through Humour.' Reading Contemporary Black British and African American Women Writers: Race, Ethics, Narrative Form. Routledge,
Ilott, S. (2019) 'Gothic and the Short Story.' The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts. Edinburgh University Press,
Ilott, S. (2019) 'Postcolonial Gothic.' Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh University Press,
Ilott, S. (2018) '‘British multiculturalism, romantic comedy, and the lie of social unification’.' Comedy and the Politics of Representation: Mocking the Weak. Palgrave,
Ilott, S., Davies, H. (2018) 'Mocking the Weak? Contexts, Theories, Politics.' Comedy and the Politics of Representation: Mocking the Weak. Palgrave,
Ilott, S. (2018) 'Comic Affiliations/Comic Subversions: The Use of Humour in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction in English.' The Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing. Routledge,
Ilott, S.E., Mendes, A.C., Newns, L. (2018) 'Introduction: New Directions, New Approaches.' New Directions in Diaspora Studies: Cultural and Literary Approaches. Rowman & Littlefield,
Ilott, S. (2018) 'Screening multicultural Britain: Blair, Britishness and Bend It Like Beckham.' Histories on Screen: The Past and Present in Anglo-American Cinema and Television. pp. 103-118.
Ilott, S.E., Germaine Buckley, C.A. (2017) 'Introduction.' Telling It Slant: Critical Approaches to Helen Oyeyemi. Sussex Academic Press,
Ilott, S.E. (2017) '“The genesis of woman goes through the mouth”: Consumption, oral pleasure, and voice’.' Telling it Slant: Critical Approaches to Helen Oyeyemi. Sussex Academic Press,
Ilott, S.E., Germaine Buckley, C.A. (2017) 'Conclusions.' Telling it Slant: Critical Approaches to Helen Oyeyemi. Sussex Academic Press,
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Journal articles
Ilott, S. (2019) 'Encounters with the Neighbour in 1970s’ British Multicultural Comedy.' Postcolonial Interventions: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 4(1)
Ilott, S.E. (2018) '“How is these kids meant to make it out the ghetto now?” Community cohesion and communities of laughter in British multicultural comedy.' Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 53(2) pp. 211-222.
Davies, H., Ilott, S. (2018) 'Gender, sexuality and the body in comedy: performance, reiteration, resistance.' Comedy Studies, 9(1) pp. 2-5.
Germaine Buckley, C.A., Ilott, S. (2017) 'Feminist Rewritings of the Spiritual and Physical Wilderness of the Bush.' Fantastika, 1(2) pp. 32-35.
Ilott, S. (2017) 'Writing British Muslims: religion, class and multiculturalism.' SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA, 9(1) pp. 99-104.
Ilott, S. (2017) 'Writing the city in British Asian diasporas.' SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA, 9(1) pp. 99-104.
Ilott, S. (2016) 'British Asian diasporic writing: construction and representation of identities.' South Asian Diaspora, 9(1) pp. 99-104.
Ilott, S., Buckley, C. (2016) 'Fragmenting and becoming double": Supplementary twins and abject bodies in Helen Oyeyemi's the Icarus Girl.' Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 51(3) pp. 402-415.
Ilott, S. (2016) 'Contemporary fictions of multiculturalism: diversity and the millennial London novel.' JOURNAL OF POSTCOLONIAL WRITING, 52(1) pp. 122-123.
Ilott, S. (2014) '"we are here to speak the unspeakable": Voicing abjection in Raj Kamal Jhas Fireproof.' Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 50(6) pp. 664-674.
Ilott, S. (2014) 'Gothic Topographies: Language, Nation Building and 'Race'.' MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW, 109pp. 1054-1056.
Ilott, S. (2014) 'Generic frameworks and active readership in The Reluctant Fundamentalist.' Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 50(5) pp. 571-583.
Ng, L., Khan, M.H., Saucier, P.K., Joseph, C.L., Pool, J., Mangalam, B., Krishnan, M., Ilott, S., Hrzán, D. (2014) 'Book Reviews.' Interventions, 16(2) pp. 277-296.
Press and media
30 April-2 May 2021 Takeover of Black History Lancaster’s social media pages (Facebook and Instagram) to post about comedy and racism.
7 November 2019 Event coverage by Chortle Comedy ‘How Boris Johnson Hijacks Comedy to Oppress: According to one academic’.
27 July 2019 Interview for Australian Broadcasting Corporation article on ‘Edgy Joke or Weaponised Comedy? Knowing when humour crosses a line’.
28 June 2019 Interview for Morgenbladet article on ‘Step carefully, comedian! What can we laugh about in an increasingly absurd world? Comedians try to find a way between chaos and cosiness’.
10 May 2019 Interview for BBC Radio Shropshire on the ‘Joking Defence’ in relation to Danny Baker’s racist tweet.
31 May 2018 ‘Roseanne Barr: saying “it’s a joke” is no defence for racism’, The Conversation.
31 January 2018 ‘Man Like Mobeen: BBC Comedy Defies Muslim Stereotypes’, The Conversation.
13 September 2016 BBC Radio Tees. Interview on ‘Mock the Weak: Comedy and the Politics of Representation’ conference.