Dr Sara Marzagora joined King’s College London in January 2020. She holds a PhD in Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies from SOAS University of London (2016) during which she also worked as Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford (2014-2016). After her PhD, she co-led for four years (2016-2019) the SOAS research project “Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies”, which studied world literature from the located perspective of multilingual societies in the Maghreb, South Asia and the Horn of Africa. Over the years, she held visiting positions at Northwestern University, Addis Ababa University, Rhodes University, City University of New York, and the ZMO (Centre for Modern Oriental Studies).

Research interests and PhD supervision

Sara is a literary and intellectual historian of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. She studies world literature and global intellectual history from the perspective of Ethiopian texts. Her research is comparative and interdisciplinary and straddles literary studies and the history of political thought.

Sara has co-edited the volume Oral Literary Worlds: Location, Transmission and Circulation (co-edited with Francesca Orsini, 2025). Currently, she is completing her book manuscript The True Meaning of Independence: Ethiopia in a Colonial World (1901-1919) and co-editing another volume on national multilingualism in South Asia and the Horn of Africa with Javed Majeed. Her research on Amharic literature, Ethiopian political thought, and Ethiopian history has been published in the Journal of African Cultural Studies, Journal of African History, International History Review, Journal of World Literature, Global Intellectual History, African Identities, Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. For a full list of publications, see her research profile.

Sara welcomes PhD proposals which propose radical approaches to global intellectual history and world literature, Global South cultural production (especially in non-European languages), South-South comparatism, and the global history of print culture and literary genres, as well as any proposals on Ethiopian history, literature and political thought.

Teaching

Sara teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in world literature, critical theory, literature and nationalism, pre-1900 African texts and genres, and the intellectual history of the Horn of Africa.