Shahidha Bari

Shahidha Bari is a writer, academic and critic, based in London. She is lecturer in Romanticism at Queen Mary University of London. In 2011, Bari was selected as one of ten BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinkers, a project launched in conjunction with the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to communicate academic research to a wider audience. Despite this, she has since been critical of the BBC and the AHRC, and of the way emphasis on accessibility and public engagement has damaged academic research. Her academic work examines Islam and the idea of the East in nineteenth-century European literature and art. Bari has previously written on contemporary philosophy, music, modern art and architecture. Her first book, Keats and Philosophy: The Life of Sensations was published in 2012. Her work has featured in The Guardian, on BBC Radio 3 Night Waves, The Essay programme and BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed. Bari is a regular columnist for Times Higher Education and frequently reviews film and visual arts for BBC Radio 4 Front Row. In print, her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Observer, New Statesman and Times Literary Supplement. She is the winner of the 2014/15 Observer Anthony Burgess Arts Journalism Prize, for a “powerful and insightful” review of the "National Theatre’s Medea" She is a trustee of the educational mentoring charity, The Arts Emergency Service. She is currently working on a cultural history of clothes.