Dr. Madeline Clements is Senior Lecturer in English Studies and specialises in postcolonial, South Asian, and particularly Pakistani, literature in English.

Before joining Teesside University in 2015, she worked as Assistant Professor in English at Forman Christian College, Lahore, Pakistan. Her PhD, on the portrayal of Muslims and Islam in post-9/11 South Asian Muslim fiction, was completed under the supervision of Professor Peter Morey at the University of East London and awarded in 2014.  

Madeline is the author of a monograph, Writing Islam from a South Asian Muslim Perspective: Rushdie, Hamid, Aslam, Shamsie (Palgrave, 2015). Her articles and chapters have appeared in journals including Sohbet, Wasafiri, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and in the edited collections Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora: Secularism, Religion, Representations, Literary and Non-literary Responses Towards 9/11: South Asia and Beyond (Routledge, 2019), Contesting Islamophobia: Anti-Muslim Prejudice in Media, Culture and Politics (I B Tauris, 2019), and Sultana’s Sisters: Genre, Gender, and Genealogy in South Asian Muslim Women’s Fiction (Routledge India, 2022).

Beyond academia, her reviews of contemporary world literature have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement and Dawn newspaper’s Books and Authors supplement. She has also written entries on contemporary Pakistani authors for the Literary Encyclopedia, and curated exhibitions of contemporary Pakistani art in London, Teesside, Karachi and Hartlepool. She is also Associate Editor at the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Her recent research has explored the representation of Christians in contemporary/later 20^th-century Pakistani literature and visual culture, and her current research continues to explore the representation of minority communities alongside questions of controversy and free speech in contemporary Pakistan. With her husband, artist Saud Baloch, she is also concerned better to understand how visual arts and culture can reflect on and contest portrayals of the current situation of conflict in Balochistan. 

Madeline has been a Co-investigator, with her colleague, Dr. Rachel Carroll, on the QR-GCRF project Women Writing Pakistan: gender in the South Asian literary landscape (2020-2021), and has led the QR-Participatory Research project Editing Women: Co-investigating autonomy and sustainability in Pakistan’s contemporary literary landscape (April-July 2022) in conjunction with her colleagues Maham Khan and Sadia Akhtar at IIUI, Islamabad. She is currently leading an Impact Acceleration Account-funded project, Editing Women in the Archives, with women literary and art editors and new generation researchers in Lahore and Karachi (Jan+ 2024), and, with Carroll as Co-Investigator, is Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded research network World Making Words: Connecting women’s literary agency, activism and enterprise in South Asia.

Madeline currently supervisors PhD students working on contemporary African literary websites, and women’s life-writing and development in Kerala. She is delighted to be approached about supervision by prospective PhD candidates for projects encompassing such areas as postcolonial, South Asian, and Anglophone Muslim writing; literature and art from Pakistan; and cultural representations of religious minorities in Islamic (including diasporic) contexts.

• Pakistani Literature (in English)
• Literature, art and minorities in Pakistan
• Gender in South Asian literary contexts
• Representation of South Asian Muslims
• Questions of free speech, censorship, controversy and contemporary South Asian culture