Professor Elleke Boehmer

University of Oxford

Expertise

Professor Elleke Boehmer is Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Historical Society, a Director of the Oxford Centre for Life Writing, and Oxford University’s first professor in world literature in English. She is an internationally recognised postcolonial specialist with Africanist and South Asian interests, and combines a career in academic writing with fiction, both novels and short stories. Professor Boehmer’s current research focuses on literary writing of and about the southern hemisphere, 1770 to the present-day, and her book Southern Imagining will be published by Princeton University Press in 2025. She also works on narrative analysis in intervention applications in subcontinental Africa and the wider Global South; on migration and narration; and on social, literary and cultural histories of Global Southern understanding.

Collaborative research project

“Centring Southern Stories” is a research project that builds on the transformational energies of storytelling - in fiction, song-cycles, legends, and national narratives – to question and revise perceptions of Australia as antipodean, marginal and distant. This research aims to track how concepts of the southern continent-nation as ‘out on the edge’ evolved historically, analyse their adverse impacts, and use the powerful tools of narrative to reposition Australia relative to the wider Southern Hemisphere, to create a more integrated world picture.

University of Adelaide host

Professor Julian Murphet
School of Humanities
Faculty of Arts, Business, Law and Economics

More information about Professor Boehmer.