Sign in

Leila Essa

@leilaessai.bsky.social
644 followers 284 following 476 posts

assistant professor of comparative literature at utrecht uni. projects on post-partition lit & authorial politics. current research and writing at intervention.sites.uu.nl. she/her.

PostsRepliesMedia
Leila Essa @leilaessai.bsky.social · 12/03/2026
whennn is Isabella Hammad's novel about the Bandung conference coming
120
Reposted by Leila Essa
Dónal Hassett @donalh.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
Very cool postdoctoral opportunity on an ERC project looking at 'Art and Liberation Movements during 20th Century Decolonization'. werkenbij.uva.nl/en/vacancies...
werkenbij.uva.nl
Vacancy — Postdoc Researcher: Art and Liberation Movements during 20th Century Decolonization
<p>The <a href="http://asca.uva.nl/" target="_self">Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis</a> currently has a vacant Postdoc researcher position as part of the European Research Council Consolidator Grant project <em>Entangled Freedoms: Decolonial Modernisms as Transnational Relations of Resistance, 1940s-1980s</em>, led by the Principal Investigator, Dr. Sanjukta Sunderason. ASCA is one of the five Research Schools within the <a href="https://aihr.uva.nl/research/research-schools.html">Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research</a> (AIHR). The Postdoc project will be part of the department of Arts and Culture (KG, Capacity Group Art History).</p>
01522
Reposted by Leila Essa
Lina Mounzer @warghetti.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
My grandmother’s home, the family home, the home I spent nearly every Sunday in for over 3 decades, the home I lived in as a teenager, that my grandparents bought in 1965 when Ghobeiri still had orchards, the house my aunt inherited & in which my cousins grew up, is gone. No one was home, thank god
157430
Leila Essa @leilaessai.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
still in me auld fella era
Screenshot of Apple Music offering me my “Replay 2026”, which consists entirely of Steely Dan and one Doobie Brothers song
210
Reposted by Leila Essa
NSU-Watch @nsuwatch.bsky.social · 19/02/2026
Wir gedenken: Gökhan Gültekin Sedat Gürbüz Said Nesar Hashemi Mercedes Kierpacz Hamza Kurtović Vili Viorel Păun Fatih Saraçoğlu Ferhat Unvar Kaloyan Velkov Ermordet vor 6 Jahren, am 19. Februar 2020, beim rassistischen Anschlag von #Hanau. Wir gedenken Ibrahim Akkuş, verstorben an den Spätfolgen.
Hintergrund: Schwarz-Weiß Bild des Gedenkens auf dem Marktplatz in Hanau, Menschen halten Schilder mit den Gesichtern der Ermordeten. Darauf die Schrift: 
Wir gedenken:

Gökhan Gültekin
Sedat Gürbüz
Said Nesar Hashemi
Mercedes Kierpacz
Hamza Kurtović
Vili Viorel Păun
Fatih Saraçoğlu
Ferhat Unvar
Kaloyan Velkov
211889823
Reposted by Leila Essa
Faisal فيصل @faisalhamadah.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
Ok comrades were all thinking it. Were all feeling it in our bones. The time is ripe. the furor, refusal and hatred of ai is just the start. Lets go back to first principles and abolish email.
0121
Leila Essa @leilaessai.bsky.social · 16/02/2026
Tenure-track professorship in Anglophone Lit / New Media Studies in Göttingen, actively looking for people who can teach Comparative and World Lit 👀 uni-goettingen.de/en/695692.html
uni-goettingen.de
W1-TT-W2 Anglophone Literature / New Media Studies - Georg-August-University Göttingen
Website of the Georg-August-University Göttingen
002
Reposted by Leila Essa
Nikesh Shukla @nikeshshukla.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
I wrote a pamphlet called Hope Must Be Held In A Clenched Fist. It’s limited to 1000 copies. It’s about hope and fear, the emboldening of the far right and the need for direct action. Buy it here www.nikesh-shukla.com/store
02815
Reposted by Leila Essa
Wasafiri Magazine @wasafirimag.bsky.social · 06/02/2026
Can a group of grassroots campaigners collaborate with a 140-year-old trade union resistant to change? @noreenmasud.bsky.social & @iammartinreed.bsky.social examine the @societyofauthors.bsky.social, one of the UK’s largest trade unions for creators, as @fossilfreebooks.org members. buff.ly/A7kzbHa
A collection of Fossil Free Books posters encouraging writers to unionise, with the essay title 'A Union of One's Own: Fossil Free Books and the Society of Authors' and author credits below. Wasafiri
0138
Reposted by Leila Essa
Eline D. Tabak @elinetabak.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
There are currently 8(!) PhDs on art & environmental justice at different unis in the Netherlands. Fascinating projects on environmental themes including soil, ceramics, & wetlands justart.info/phd/ Deadlines all mid-March. I'm not associated but happy to talk about my favourite cities in NL ;)
justart.info
PhDs
JUST ART includes ten PhD projects across varied fields, including practice-based artistic research. These will be advertised in January / February 2026, with a proposed start date of September 202…
164
Reposted by Leila Essa
The New Negroni @omweekes.bsky.social · 10/02/2026
My latest review for @bookforum.bsky.social is also out now. In it, I think alongside Namwali Serpell’s resplendently rigorous new book on Toni Morrison about the last greatest living writer’s legacy and how we’re meant to read her.
bookforum.com
A Heartbreaking Work of Swaggering Genius
Namwali Serpell’s study of Toni Morrison – Omari Weekes
621268
Leila Essa @leilaessai.bsky.social · 10/02/2026
immense relief of revisiting a text that needs finishing after a term-long break and realising it was going somewhere
050
Leila Essa @leilaessai.bsky.social · 16/01/2026
One of the families who had to relocate to a hotel after the gas leak explosions here in Utrecht yesterday had just arrived from Gaza. Please consider helping them cover the extra costs: gofund.me/50ba61456
gofund.me
Donate to Help een gezin na de brand: tijdelijke hotelkosten Utrecht, organized by Kathelyn Spanjers
Na de brand in het centrum van Utrecht moest een gezin met tw… Kathelyn Spanjers needs your support for Help een gezin na de brand: tijdelijke hotelkosten Utrecht
021
Reposted by Leila Essa
Mia You @miayou.bsky.social · 10/01/2026
Please join us to welcome Kim Hyesoon to NL. Her first stop is at @utrechtuniversity.bsky.social for a special event on translation and transcultural/multispecies solidarities. Free & open to the public.
142
Leila Essa @leilaessai.bsky.social · 11/12/2025
Incredibly nice to have my Publishing class interrupted by an email announcing a book contract :)))
4220
Leila Essa @leilaessai.bsky.social · 10/12/2025
I love this essay so so much (Sophie Corser in @thepigsback.bsky.social)
An open copy of issue 7 of literary magazine The Pig’s Back. First page of the essay “No Need to Respond” by Sophie Corser:

“Not long ago, I travelled from the UK to Northampton, Massachusetts, to look at over sixty folders full of fanmail. Alison Bechdel-American cartoonist, creator of the Bechdel test, and author of three graphic memoirs and the comic series Dykes to Watch Out For-has given Smith College Libraries hundreds of letters from her fans, received between 1984 and 2021. So, I spent a week with Bechdel's readers.

Bechdel invites fanmail: on her long-running blog she still lists a PO box address and states she's happy to receive snail-mail. For a time she sold artwork to her fans directly via mail, and by her own admission was once seduced by a fan's letter. But I didn't go to Massachusetts to learn more about Bechdel. I went to think about, or imagine, a community of readers. A kind of collective reception.

I made the trip at quite a difficult time. It was the last week of May 2023, and I was apprehensive about the months to come. Early June”
131
Reposted by Leila Essa
Leila Essa @leilaessai.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
Happy publication day to one of my dearest friends!! Luna Sabastian’s ’Fascism in India: Race, Caste, and Hindutva’ is out now, a truly extraordinary book. I’m so glad I got to witness the entire journey - including actual joint research trips to Berlin and Delhi! www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978067...
hup.harvard.edu
Fascism in India — Harvard University Press
A revisionist account arguing that Indian nationalism served as a laboratory for fascist ideas that continue to animate the Hindutva political movement of today.Fascism swept the world in the 1920s an...
193
Reposted by Leila Essa
Christian Algar @ceebarnacles.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
Reading Rooms at the British Library are closed *all week* because so many of its workers refuse to work for pitiful wages in a contemptuously authoritarian and obliviously managed environment. We need leaders who get it and are big enough to sort it out! It’s a mess and a disgrace. Lift it up!!
014276
Leila Essa @leilaessai.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
Happy publication day to one of my dearest friends!! Luna Sabastian’s ’Fascism in India: Race, Caste, and Hindutva’ is out now, a truly extraordinary book. I’m so glad I got to witness the entire journey - including actual joint research trips to Berlin and Delhi! www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978067...
hup.harvard.edu
Fascism in India — Harvard University Press
A revisionist account arguing that Indian nationalism served as a laboratory for fascist ideas that continue to animate the Hindutva political movement of today.Fascism swept the world in the 1920s an...
193
Reposted by Leila Essa
Jochen Hung @jochenhung.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
Today, university staff and students in the Netherlands are on strike! We protest against continuing budget cuts of over 1bn euros by a cabinet that has been voted out of power over a month ago.
0125
Leila Essa @leilaessai.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
Huge joy getting to see two dear colleagues launch their books tonight! Get your hands (and university library orders) on 1. Femi Eromosele’s ‘Mad Fictions: Psychiatry, Disability and the Politics of Mental Distress in African Literature’ www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/... and on…
liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk
Mad Fictions | Home
Psychiatry, Disability and the Politics of Mental Distress in African Literature
120
Leila Essa @leilaessai.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
can hardly imagine anything more tedious than the discussions about whether the most recent discussions about whether Germany is fucked have been very good or very bad
280
Reposted by Leila Essa
Andrew Simon @simongandrew.bsky.social · 07/12/2025
The first of several copies I’ll be gifting in Cairo to those who generously shared stories with me over several years that made this book possible.
141
Reposted by Leila Essa
Nina Markl 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 @ninamarkl.bsky.social · 06/12/2025
one small lesson to take away from the crumbling HE sector, btw, is that there is no such thing as meritocracy here and the only thing that matters is doing work that is meaningful to you and the people you care about and to make friends and collaborators in the process
37120
Reposted by Leila Essa
Marco Fuchs @marcofuchs74.bsky.social · 06/12/2025
Mit seinem Besuch bei Benjamin Netanyahu schreibt Friedrich Merz Geschichte: Erstmals seit Gründung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland trifft sich ein Bundeskanzler mit einer Person, die vom Internationalen Strafgerichtshof in Den Haag wegen mutmaßlicher Kriegsverbrechen per Haftbefehl gesucht wird.
314130
Reposted by Leila Essa
Mia You @miayou.bsky.social · 06/12/2025
Kim Hyesoon in Dutch, translated by the wonderful brilliant generous @marwinvos.bsky.social in @groene.nl . KHS will be visiting NL in January, with various programs at @utrechtuniversity.bsky.social Writers Unlimited Festival & Perdu 💫
1104
Leila Essa @leilaessai.bsky.social · 06/12/2025
The Gehry buildings in my hometown bring me joy whenever I see them
The white and silver wonky Gehry buildings in Düsseldorf
090
Leila Essa @leilaessai.bsky.social · 05/12/2025
2 more weeks of 12-hour teaching
100
Leila Essa @leilaessai.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
Dismayed that Steely Dan has not made it into my top artists but delighted with all of my songs of the month 🏆
JANUARY
tv off (feat. Lefty Gu...
Kendrick Lamar


FEBRUARY
Stumblin' In
Chris Norman & Suzi Quatro


MARCH
Matter of Time
Vulfpeck


APRIL
THINGS BEHIND THING...
Bon Iver


MAY
You Sexy Thing (Single...
Hot Chocolate


JUNE
Over and Done With 
The Proclaimers


JULY
Aht Uh Mi Hed
Shuggie Otis

AUGUST
Throw the 'R' Away
The Proclaimers


SEPTEMBER
TOURMALINE
Earl Sweatshirt

OCTOBER
Man I Need
Olivia Dean


NOVEMBER
It Just Doesn't Happen
Destroyer
110
Reposted by Leila Essa
Dennis Hogan @dennismhogan.bsky.social · 03/12/2025
what's the best thing I can read to understand the whole deal with medieval allegory?
131
Leila Essa @leilaessai.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
Denmark is dismantling it’s letterboxes because the post there will no longer be responsible for sending letters as of 2026 😭
010
Leila Essa @leilaessai.bsky.social · 01/12/2025
the one lasting impact of One Battle After Another is that it’s turned me into a Steely Dan guy
050
Leila Essa @leilaessai.bsky.social · 01/12/2025
teaching Mahmoud Darwish's poetry alongside Refqa Abu-Remaileh's digital atlas of Palestinian literature this week - it really is an extraordinary publication
041
Reposted by Leila Essa
Dr. Melissa Schuh @melissaschuh.bsky.social · 29/11/2025
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, because my book is out now, fresh off the press! Happy book birthday to “Literary Autobiography: Contemporary Novelists and their Self-Representations” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) 📕🎉! doi.org/10.1007/978-... @hss.springernature.com
Book cover: Melissa Schuh, Literary Autobiography: Contemporary No Elises and their Self-Representations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)Flyer: Melissa Schuh
Literary Autobiography
Contemporary Novelists and their Self-Representations
-Explores the narrative strategies developed by novelists as they cross generic boundaries of �ction and non-fiction
-Presents case studies of works by canonical contemporary authors
-Develops de�nitions and concepts to analyse forms of autobiographical writing that �flaunt their �fictionality

Part of the book series:
Palgrave Studies in Life Writing

Get 20% off with this code: PALAUTPALGRAVE STUDIES IN LIFE WRITING
Series Editors: Clare Brant • Max Saunders

"Melissa Schuh's Literary Autobiography offers a theoretically elegant and literarily sensitive rethinking of the fraught relationship between the novel and autobiography. Central to the book is the concept of performative contradiction, which Schuh develops as the defining aesthetic strategy of literary autobiography—a strategy that embraces fictionality not to undermine life writing, but to open it toward deeper questions of truth, identity, and narrative ethics. Schuh's analyses of Roth, Coetzee, and Grass persuasively show how these works form an aesthetic lineage that contemporary autofiction continues to draw from. This book will be indispensable for scholars across life writing studies, narratology, and literary ethics."
—Stefan Kjerkegaard, Aarhus University, Denmark
Why do novelists write about themselves? What modes do novelists use to manipulate representations of their personality? Why is it often late in their career that novelists write about their own lives? This book develops the concept of literary autobiography as a genre responding to a profound uncertainty about the knowability of the self, often negotiated through a particular concern with the writing life. Comprising a particular sub-genre and style of contemporary life writing, the autobiographies examined in this book foreground their formal
'literariness' through the explicit use of fictionality, disrupting established (auto) biographical tropes by employing narrative innovations associated with postmodern fiction and prefigured by modernist experimentation. Taken together, they exemplify an aesthetics of performative contradiction, in which novelistic strategies cast doubt on the veracity of the life represented. Exploring works by canonical and popular novelists - J.M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, Günter Grass, Elena Ferrante, and Karl Ove Knausgard - this book addresses the increasing novelisation of contemporary life w…
73612
Leila Essa @leilaessai.bsky.social · 30/11/2025
Seeing so many books I’d like to pitch reviews for but I am NOT ALLOWED (by myself)
020
Leila Essa @leilaessai.bsky.social · 30/11/2025
Wah how pathetic
070
Leila Essa @leilaessai.bsky.social · 29/11/2025
Not a particularly original observation but Liadan Ní Chuinn is the real deal huh
000
Reposted by Leila Essa
Stephen O'Neill @oneillsb.bsky.social · 28/11/2025
Mickey Mouse was a tout
031
Leila Essa @leilaessai.bsky.social · 28/11/2025
This is the first time in forever that I have slept through from ten to seven???? All it takes is a wonderful evening with friends and a sacrificial turkey and my insomnia is healed!!
150
Reposted by Leila Essa
Johanna Winant @johannawinant.bsky.social · 26/11/2025
I wrote an essay for @bostonreview.bsky.social about what I learned about close reading when I taught at West Virginia University www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...
bostonreview.net
The Claims of Close Reading - Boston Review
Literary studies have been starved by austerity, but their core methodology remains radical.
29517173
Reposted by Leila Essa
Susanne Ferwerda @susanneferwerda.bsky.social · 26/11/2025
Feeling honored and grateful to receive the Best Article Prize this year! 💙 Huge thanks to the wonderful editorial team from Environmental Humanities journal for their support in publishing this work. Feeling so motivated to dive even deeper into many waters of the Blue Humanities! 🌊✨ #envhum
0173
Leila Essa @leilaessai.bsky.social · 26/11/2025
Sad that I couldn’t go to see Achille Mbembe talk at Utrecht University last night, but delighted to hear that his answer to a question about his 2020 ”excommunication“ from Germany was to just laugh
051
Reposted by Leila Essa
Caylum O'Neill @caylumon.bsky.social · 26/11/2025
In a bumper week for publications, I am also delighted to have my chapter "Familial Trauma and Queer Sexual Catharsis in Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart" published in the collection Queer Trauma Across Borders, edited by Anchit Sathi. link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...
link.springer.com
Familial Trauma and Queer Sexual Catharsis in Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart
In Neel Mukherjee&#8217;s 2008 novel A Life Apart (originally published as Past Continuous), the abject and the traumatic become interwoven motifs in its depiction of a young gay man&#8217;s emigratio...
121
Reposted by Leila Essa
Mia You @miayou.bsky.social · 26/11/2025
On 29 Nov, I’ll be interviewing the Palestinian-Syrian poet Ghayath Almadhoun & his Dutch translator Djûke Poppinga. Every day is a day of international solidarity with the Palestinian people. @actionbooks.bsky.social @uitgjurgenmaas.bsky.social www.wintertuinfestival.nl/en/blog/prog...
wintertuinfestival.nl
Ghayath Almadhoun - Wintertuinfestival
0194
Leila Essa @leilaessai.bsky.social · 25/11/2025
lecture slides for tomorrow will mainly consist of photos I’ve taken at the Etel Adnan exhibition in Düsseldorf
an abstract landscape paintinga leporello combining painting and Arabic scriptthe first pages of “The Arab Apocalypse” mounted on a red wall
070
Leila Essa @leilaessai.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
through week 2 of this now, in which we looked at short stories of displacement in the contexts of Partition, the Nakba, the Holocaust, and the Black diaspora and the students gave such insightful close and comparative readings
030
Reposted by Leila Essa
Daniel Kennedy @fliglman.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
I make jokes about how often Sarkozy publishes memoirs, but here he is publishing his "prison memoir" (after serving only 20 days of a five year sentence)
1151
Leila Essa @leilaessai.bsky.social · 20/11/2025
I got Asako Yuzuki’s Butter in the hope for fun murder mystery and food but it’s gone from supposedly critical but intensely detailed depictions of diet culture and tradwifery to therapy speak 🥲
220