Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Ghalya Saadawi

Thesis: Dear London, unfinished letters January – July 2025

July 2025

Abstract

This project explores the political and affective possibilities of writing theory through personal experience, using the epistolary form to examine life in contemporary London. Composed as a series of “unfinished” letters to persons real and imagined, the dissertation considers themes of housing precarity, gentrification, grief, and temporal dislocation, situating these within a broader reflection on the embodied experience of late capitalism.

Dear London asks whether form itself can function as a mode of political inquiry. The letters explore how writing addressed to an other can open questions of complicity, distance, and identification, and how narrative form might transmit theory affectively, outside the traditional registers of academic prose. While the project ultimately resists coherence or resolution, it argues for the value of beginning from affect — of writing that allows memory, loss, and longing to shape both content and form. In doing so, it approaches writing as a mode of thinking through, rather than a container for, political life.

Author: Clara Rudin Smith