Shahidha Bari


Shahidha Bari is a British writer, academic and critic. She is Professor of Fashion Cultures and Histories at London College of Fashion at the University of the Arts London. She is one of the regular presenters of the BBC Radio 3 arts and ideas programme Free Thinking. and an occasional presenter of BBC Radio 4's Front Row.

Biography

She was educated at King's College Cambridge and lives in London. She is a Fellow of the Forum for Philosophy at the London School of Economics and an arts reviewer for a number of publications.
Her academic work moves between philosophy, psychoanalysis, literary theory and visual culture. Her book Dressed: The Secret Life of Clothes was published in 2019. She is currently working on a philosophical study of beauty.
In 2011, Bari was selected as one of ten BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinkers, a new project launched in conjunction with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to communicate academic research to a wider audience. She is the winner of the 2014/15 Observer Anthony Burgess Arts Journalism Prize, for a "powerful and insightful" review of the National Theatre's Medea.
In print, her writing appears in The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Observer and the New Statesman. She is a regular columnist for Times Higher Education, a reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement, a contributor to Aeon and frieze, and appears as a cultural critic on BBC TV. She has presented documentaries for BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service. She is a frequent contributor to Radio 4's Woman's Hour and Saturday Review.
She was a trustee of the educational mentoring charity The Arts Emergency Service and the Chair of Judges for the Forward Prizes for Poetry in 2019. In 2020, she joined the panel of judges for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.