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 a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford (2014–2016). After her PhD, she led the Horn of Africa strand of the SOAS research project Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies (2016–2019). Over the years, she held visiting positions at Northwestern University, Addis Ababa University, Rhodes University, the City University of New York and the ZMO (Centre for Modern Oriental Studies). She has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for 2026–27 to pursue the project Between Freedom and Colonialism: Ethiopian Texts in Global History. 

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 through Ethiopian sources, interrogating the relationship between the capitalist transformations of the modern era, political thought and textual production.

Her forthcoming monograph, The True Meaning of Independence: Ethiopian Sovereignty in an Unequal World, offers a global intellectual history of Ethiopian state formation at the turn of the twentieth century. It traces how Ethiopian thinkers grappled with their country’s unequal incorporation into the capitalist world economy and with the limits this placed on Ethiopian political independence. She is co-editor, with Francesca Orsini, of Oral Literary Worlds: Location, Transmission and Circulation, and, with Javed Majeed, of National Multilingualism in the Horn of Africa and South Asia. For a full list of publications, see her research profile.

She is currently pursuing two research projects. One rethinks the history of comparative literature from a Global South perspective, with particular attention to literature’s role in projects of socialist and anticolonial transformation. The other interrogates the political and intellectual legacies of the 1974 Ethiopian Revolution, asking what its emancipatory vision and historical limitations can teach the contemporary left.

Sara welcomes PhD proposals that bring critical and materialist approaches to global intellectual history and comparative literature, particularly projects grounded in grounded in the languages, archives and print cultures of the Global South.

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.