Shahidha Bari

Prof Shahidha Bari
Born1980 (age 43–44)
NationalityBritish
EducationKing's College, Cambridge
Occupation(s)Academic, critic, broadcaster
EmployerUniversity of the Arts London

Shahidha Bari (born 1980) is a British academic, critic and broadcaster in the fields of literature, philosophy and art.[1][2] She is a professor at the University of the Arts London based at London College of Fashion.[3] She is a host of the topical arts television programme Inside Culture on BBC Two, standing in for Mary Beard,[4] one of the presenters of the BBC Radio 4 arts and ideas programme Free Thinking (previously titled Night Waves),[5] and an occasional presenter of BBC Radio 4's Front Row.[6]

Biography

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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.[7] She comes from a family of Bengali Muslims.

Her academic work moves between philosophy, literature and visual culture. Her book Dressed: The Philosophy of Clothes was published in 2019.[8][9] Her latest book, Look Again: Fashion is a viewer's guide to fashion in the Tate Britain art collection.[10]

In 2011, Bari was selected as one of ten BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinkers,[11] a new project launched in conjunction with the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) 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.[12]

In print, her writing appears in The Financial Times,[13] The Observer and the New Statesman. She is one of the regular books reviewers for The Guardian[14] and The Times Literary Supplement,[15] a contributor to Aeon[16] and frieze[17] and appears as a cultural critic on BBC TV.[18] She has presented documentaries for BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service.

Bari was on the board of the educational mentoring charity The Arts Emergency Service and currently is a trustee of the Brontë Parsonage Museum and Art Night.[19] She was the chair of judges for the Forward Prizes for Poetry in 2019, [20] a judge for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction in 2020 [21] and on the judging panel for The Booker Prize 2022.[22]

References

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  1. ^ Bari, Shahidh (2019), Dressed The Secret Life Of Clothes, Vintage, (About the Author).
  2. ^ "Shahidha Bari". Penguin Books Australia. Retrieved 18 July 2023.
  3. ^ "Shahidha Bari". UAL.
  4. ^ "How we read". Inside Culture. BBC Two.
  5. ^ "Jeremy Dyson and Irving Finkel". Free Thinking. BBC Radio 3.
  6. ^ "Tributes to Clive James and Jonathan Miller". Front Row. 2019. BBC Radio 4.
  7. ^ "Forum for European Philosophy". London School of Economics. Retrieved 8 April 2017.
  8. ^ "Dressed". Amazon. ASIN 1787331490.
  9. ^ Hughes, Kathryn Hughes (6 June 2019). "Review | Dressed by Shahidha Bari and The Pocket review – two books on the secret life of clothes". Guardian.
  10. ^ "Look Again: Fashion". Tate.
  11. ^ Brown, Mark (28 June 2011). "X Factor-style search for 10 academics from generation think". The Guardian. Retrieved 5 October 2013.
  12. ^ Bari, Shahidha (8 March 2015). "Anthony Burgess prize-winning essay, 2014: National Theatre's Medea". The Observer.
  13. ^ Bari, Shahidha (18 March 2016). "Rain: Four Walks in English Weather', by Melissa Harrison". Financial Times Life and Arts.
  14. ^ "Game Theory'". The Guardian.
  15. ^ Bari, Shahidha (6 February 2017). "Undone Done, Sam McKnight, Somerset House, London". Times Literary Supplement.
  16. ^ Bari, Shahidha (19 May 2016). "What do clothes say?". Aeon.
  17. ^ "Life and times of Alexander McQueen". Frieze Art Magazine.
  18. ^ "Front Row Late". BBC. 18 January 2019.
  19. ^ "Art Night 2021".
  20. ^ "Forward Prizes for Poetry 2019". Forward Prizes for Poetry.
  21. ^ "Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction".
  22. ^ "Booker Prize Judges in 2022".
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