Dr Sara Salem

Sara Salem is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at LSE. Her main research interests include political sociology, postcolonial studies, Marxist theory, feminist theory, and global histories of empire and imperialism. She is an editor at the journals Sociological Review and Historical Materialism.

Key expertise: Postcolonialism, Decolonisation, Feminism, Middle East, Traveling theories

Sara's work explores the connections between postcolonial theory and Marxism, with special attention to the context of Egypt and the period of decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century. She is particularly interested in questions of anticolonial archives, traveling theory, postcolonial/anti-colonial nationalism, and the afterlives and entanglements of empire in the Middle East.

Sara co-directs two projects, Disembodied Territories (with Menna Agha) and Archive Stories (with Mai Taha).

Sara's first book, entitled Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt: The Politics of Hegemony, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. This book builds its analysis of the afterlives of Egypt’s moment of decolonisation through an imagined conversation between Antonio Gramsci and Frantz Fanon around questions of anticolonialism, resistance, revolution and liberation. Anticolonial Afterlives argues that the Nasserist project – created by Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers in 1952 – remains the only instance of hegemony in modern Egyptian history, and that the 2011 revolution signified the end-point of its decline, decades after it was created. Nasserism was made possible in and through local, regional and global anticolonial politics, even as it reproduced colonial ways of governing that reverberate into Egypt’s present. Anticolonial Afterlives explores these tensions through Gramsci and Fanon, foundational theorists of anti-capitalism and anticolonialism, and in doing so engages with some of the problematics around applying Gramsci’s thought in contexts such as Egypt and thinking about Fanon’s writing in relation to anticolonialism today.

Her second book project, tentatively entitled Anticolonial Archives, explores the possibilities and tensions embedded within the question of archives and archiving anticolonial pasts, presents and futures.

She is also currently working on a book project with Mai Taha, entitled: Sonic Lives: On the Radio and Anticolonial Solidarity.

Sara is a member of the Politics and Human Rights research cluster.

Sara teaches on the MSc Human Rights and Politics programme. She convenes the undergraduate course The Sociology of Race and Empire and the postgraduate course The Anticolonial Archive: The Sociology of Empire and its Afterlives.

She is happy to supervise PhD projects related to anticolonialism and/or decolonisation, postcolonial theory, Marxist theory, archives and archiving, and global histories of empire.