Madeline Clements

Dr. Madeline Clements is Senior Lecturer in English Studies. She specialises in postcolonial, South Asian, and particularly Pakistani writing, in English and English translation. She also maintains a critical interest in visual art from Pakistan, and in the art of South Asians in Britain.

Before joining Teesside University in 2015, she worked as Assistant Professor in English at Forman Christian College, Lahore, Pakistan (2014-2015), and completed a Residency at the National College of Arts, Lahore (2012). 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( awarded 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 Pakistan (Karachi) and the UK (London, Teesside, Hartlepool). Additionally, she has been an Associate Editor at the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Her post-doctoral research has explored the representation of Christians in contemporary/later 20^th-century Pakistani literature and visual culture. Her current research continues to explore the cultural representation of minority communities alongside questions of controversy and free speech in contemporary Pakistan. With her husband, sculptor 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, in conjunction with the Pakistan Association of Women Publishers and Editors (PAWPE), working with women literary and art editors and new generation researchers in Lahore and Karachi to preserve endangered publications and make them widely accessible (2024-). In 2024-2025, Madeline has also been Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded research network World Making Words: Connecting women’s literary agency, activism and enterprise in South Asia, which she co-leads with Dr Rachel Carroll (Co-Investigator).

Madeline currently supervisors PhD students working on contemporary African literary websites, women’s life-writing and development in Kerala, and curatorial approaches to diversifying collections and displays at the Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford. 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; literary activism and protest, 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
• Literary and arts activism and protest
• Free speech, censorship, controversy and contemporary South Asian culture