Sara Suleri Goodyear

Sara Suleri Goodyear was a Pakistan-born American author, professor of English, and founding editor of the Yale Journal of Criticism. She was born in Karachi, Pakistan, in 1953, one of six children of a prominent journalist and a professor of English. She received her education in Lahore, Delhi, and Indiana, where she earned her PhD in English. She taught at Williams College and Yale University, where she specialized in Romantic and Victorian poetry, postcolonial literature and theory, and contemporary cultural criticism. She was also a founding editor of the Yale Journal of Criticism, and served on the editorial boards of The Yale Review and Transition. She wrote two seminal texts of postcolonial studies, Meatless Days (1989), a memoir of her life in Pakistan, and The Rhetoric of English India (1992), a study of colonial discourse and literature. She also wrote a memoir based on her father's life and career, Boys Will Be Boys (2003), and co-authored a tribute to the Urdu poet Ghalib, A Tribute to Ghalib: Twenty-One Ghazals Reinterpreted (2019). She was widely admired and respected by her colleagues and students, who praised her originality, intelligence, and eloquence. She was also a recipient of several awards and honors, such as the MacArthur Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Berlin Prize. She died of natural causes at her home in Bellingham, Washington, on March 20, 2022. She was 68 years old.