Martha Swift

Dr Martha Swift is a Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute and Junior Research Fellow in the Humanities at St Catherine’s College. Her research examines concepts of ‘worldliness’ and interrogates the relationship between World Literature and American Literature through genres such as autofiction and the literary Western. 

Her current project is about the way that contemporary writers of the American West—novelists, poets, playwrights and illustrators—in the United States and around the world are reworking 150 years of the Western’s history, engaging long histories of travel, transnational authorship and global interconnectedness in the region and for the genre. As part of this project, Martha is running an ECR network and reading group about the invention of ‘westness’ with support from the British Association for American Studies Development Fund. Please get in touch if you would like to be involved. 

Martha is also finalising her first monograph, The World of American Autofiction, which uses the frameworks and theory of world literature to explore how a selection of multiethnic and diasporic North American writers uses autofiction to explore transnational interconnection and to reflect on their writerly responsibilities within global networks. 

Martha received her DPhil from Oxford’s Faculty of English in 2024. In 2025, she was a Visiting Fellow at the United States Study Center at the University of Sydney. Her recent academic publications include the article ‘New Wave, New Waste: Expanding Waste Studies through Chinese Science Fiction’ in Contemporary Literature 65 (June 2025) and the chapter ‘Autofiction’ in the edited collection Experimental Life Writing Today from Bloomsbury (October 2025). Her writing has also been published by creativecritical.net, It's Freezing in LA!, SENT, and Meanjin.