Leila Essa is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. She currently conducts , for which she has been awarded a Veni grant by the Duch Research Council (NWO).
Leila regularly writes and talks about literature and its politics on public platforms, e.g. for Zeit Online, Berlin Review and the Goethe Institute. She is one of the authors of the anthology anders bleiben and, as of 2023, a judge for the Kurt-Tucholsky-Preis for politically engaged writing in German. Her academic work has appeared in journals like Comparative Literature Studies and the book project building on her PhD thesis, Partitioned Nations, Shared Narratives: Contemporary Novels on India and Germany, won the Women in German Studies Book Prize 2021. She is a member of the Editorial Board for Forum for Modern Language Studies and the Advisory Board for FRAME Journal of Literary Studies.
Leila obtained her degrees in literary studies from King鈥檚 College London (BA, 2014, and PhD, 2020) and the University of Cambridge (MPhil, 2015). Her doctoral research, which involved extensive study visits to Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. She taught in both the Comp Lit and German departments at King鈥檚 as a PhD student and then took up the position of Teaching Fellow in German at Trinity College Dublin in 2020. In 2021 she joined the Comp Lit section at Utrecht University as a Lecturer and was appointed permanently as Assistant Professor one year later. Her teaching currently focuses on the MA Literature Today, for which she is Internship Coordinator and delivers a course on contemporary publishing.