Leila Essa is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. Her current research project ‘Intention & Intervention', funded through a Veni grant by the Dutch Research Council from 2022 to 2026, examines authorial strategies against exclusionary discourses in Germany and Britain.

She regularly updates the accompanying research blog and writes/speaks about literature and its politics for public platforms, e.g. Die Zeit, Berlin Review and the Goethe Institute. She is one of the authors of the anthology anders bleiben and a judge for the Kurt-Tucholsky-Preis for politically engaged writing in small forms. Her academic work has appeared in journals like Comparative Literature Studies and she currently co-edits the volume Activist Writing / Activist Reading with Marta Cenedese (under contract with Bloomsbury Academic). She is also working on her book Partitioned Nations, Shared Narratives, which has won the Women in German Studies Book Prize for first monographs in preparation. Building on her PhD thesis, it compares how contemporary novels on India and Germany narrate the post-partition nation.

Leila obtained her degrees in comparative literary studies at King’s College London (BA, 2014, and PhD, 2020) and at the University of Cambridge (MPhil, 2015). Her doctoral research, which involved extensive study visits to Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. She taught in both the Comp Lit and German departments at King’s as a PhD student and then took up the position of Teaching Fellow in German at Trinity College Dublin in 2020. In 2021, she joined the Comp Lit section at Utrecht University as a Lecturer and was appointed as Assistant Professor the following year. As of 2025, she co-leads the Modern and Contemporary Literature research group at UU alongside Ewout van der Knaap. Her teaching focuses on literatures of migration and diaspora in the BA Literary Studies and on contemporary publishing in the MA Literature Today. Leila welcomes inquiries from prospective PhD students.

She is a member of the Editorial Board for Forum for Modern Language Studies and the Advisory Board for FRAME Journal of Literary Studies.