Shela Sheikh is Lecturer at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, where she convenes the MA Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy. Prior to this she was Research Fellow and Publications Coordinator on the ERC-funded “Forensic Architecture” project based in the Centre for Research Architecture. She is currently working on a monograph about the phenomenon of the “martyr video-testimony” and its cultural representation, read primarily through the lens of deconstruction; and a multi-platform collaborative research project around colonialism, botany and the politics of planting. Within the context of the latter, she is co-editing, with Ros Gray, a special issue of Third Text entitled “The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions” (Spring 2018).

Shela received her PhD in History from Goldsmiths, University of London (under the direction of Professor Howard Caygill and Dr. Elina Staikou; Thesis examiners: Professor Alexander García Düttman, Professor Eduardo Cadava). Thesis title: “‘I am the martyr (x)’: Philosophical Reflections of Testimony and Martyrdom”. She has an MA Postcolonial Studies from the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London (under the direction of Dr. Hito Steyerl) and a BA Spanish & History of Art, University College London.

Besides research and teaching, Shela has worked in publishing since 2005, most recently as Managing Editor and member of the editorial board of Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, ed. Forensic Architecture (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), and as editor for Fazal Sheikh’s Erasure Trilogy (Göttingen: Steidl, 2015). She is also a peer reviewer for Theory, Culture & Society.