Professor Elleke Boehmer
Professor of World Literature in English, Faculty of English
Professor Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford and Executive Director of the Oxford Centre for Life Writing. She is an Elected Fellow of the Australian Humanities Academy, of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Historical Society. Since 2023, she has been an Extraordinary Professor in English at the University of Pretoria.
About
Elleke Boehmer (BA(Hons), MPhil (Oxon), DPhil (Oxon)) is Professor of World Literature in English, in the English Faculty at Oxford University, and Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, based at Wolfson College. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Historical Society and the Australian Humanities Academy.
She is a founding figure in the field of colonial and postcolonial studies, and internationally known for her research in anglophone literatures of empire and anti-empire. In 2020-21, Professor Boehmer was a Leverhulme/British Academy Senior Research Fellow working on the project Southern Imagining, a major literary and cultural history about perceptions of the southern hemisphere.
Professor Boehmer is the author of a wide range of publications, including Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (OUP, 1995, 2005), Indian Arrivals (ESSE prizewinner 2016); Postcolonial Poetics (2018) and Nelson Mandela (2008, 2023). She is the author of six novels, including The Shouting in the Dark (Olive Schreiner Prize-winner 2019), Screens Against the Sky (1990), Ice Shock (2025) and the short story collections Sharmilla (2010) and To the Volcano (2019). In 2025-26, Professor Boehmer published a trio of books about the ‘far southern edge of the world’, including, most recently, Southern Imagining (Princeton).
A Rhodes Scholar (1985-88), Professor Boehmer is a Professorial Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College. Among her recent research projects was the Fell-funded Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds (2016-18) which asks how our reading of British literature shapes our sense of identity in Britain today. The project is particularly interested in thinking about how Black and Asian writing in Britain works as a dynamic cultural and imaginative medium through which new ways of thinking about Britain, and Britain in the world, can be shaped.
Professor Boehmer was the Humanities lead on the GCRF UKRI funded Accelerating Achievement for Africa’s Adolescents Hub (Accelerate Hub), 2019-23, involved in exploring the role of narrative and intervention in a range of African contexts. See The Conversation article Better access to stories can improve adolescent lives in Africa. She was also PI on the Andrew W. Mellon-funded 'Humanities and Identities' project at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, 2017-18.
Expertise
- Postcolonial literature
- Empire and imperial history
- Race and resistance
- World literature in English
- Black British literature
- Global South
- African literature – South, West and East
- Migration and diaspora
Selected publications
- Southern Imagining: A Literary and Cultural History of the Far Southern Hemisphere (2025)
- Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-Century Critical Readings (Palgrave 2018)
- Indian Arrivals, 1870-1915: Networks of British Empire (2015)
- Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction (2008, 2023)
- Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation (2005, 2009)
- Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (1995, 2005)
Media experience
Media experience includes an interview with Al Jazeera when American poet Louise Glück was announced as the winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature and BBC and CBC commentary in 2013 following the death of Nelson Mandela.
Professor Elleke Boehmer is also curator of the open educational resource hub Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds.
Languages
English, Dutch, French, Spanish