Rachael Gilmour

Professor Rachael Gilmour is a faculty member at Queen Mary University of London, holding the title of Professor of Contemporary Literature and Postcolonial Studies. She serves as Director of Graduate Studies: Admissions (English) within the School of English and Drama. Her academic journey includes a PhD from the University of Manchester, followed by a career at Queen Mary since 2002, focusing on postcolonial literature and theory. She has a multidisciplinary background in linguistics, cultural history, and literary studies.

Her research explores language politics, multilingualism, and their intersections with colonial/postcolonial contexts. Notable projects include the Reading/Writing Multilingualism initiative, which engages secondary school students in Tower Hamlets, and her book Bad English: Literature, Multilingualism and the Politics of Language in Contemporary Britain (2020). She has held editorial roles at the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Wasafiri, and her work bridges literary analysis with applied linguistics and cultural policy.

Recent research focuses on literature’s confrontation with language as a bordering practice in the UK asylum regime. She has supervised doctoral projects on topics like multilingualism in contemporary fiction, postcolonial narratives, and literary representations of race and identity.

Her publications span monographs, edited volumes, and peer-reviewed articles addressing colonial linguistics, Black British writing, and the global dimensions of literary multilingualism. She actively contributes to pedagogical initiatives that integrate multilingualism into English education.