Martha Swift

Dr Martha Swift is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute and Coordinator of the Environmental Humanities Research Hub at the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. Her research examines the intersection of Anglophone autofiction and world literature and, looking to the future, engages discussions in the environmental humanities about the role of writers and critics in the Anthropocene.

She is currently completing her first monograph, The World of Autofiction: diasporic authorship and collective world-making in the twenty-first century, which uses the frameworks and theory of world literature to read the autofictional novels, short stories and films of a selection of multi-ethnic American authors. It explores how these writers use autofiction to express a sense of transnational interconnection and to reflect on their responsibilities as mixed-race, diasporic and/or multinational writers within global networks. In doing so, it destabilises the dominant assumption that ‘world literature’ refers to texts that originate beyond US borders and presents literary practice as a mode of response and resistance to global and globalising events.

She also has forthcoming publications on feminism and experimental use of the ‘auto’ in Anglo-American fiction from the 1970s to the present, on the intersection of contemporary autofiction and narratological theory, and on the intersection of waste studies and Chinese science fiction through the twentieth century

Dr Swift completed her DPhil in Oxford’s Faculty of English in 2024. Her research has been supported by the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission, the Rothermere American Institute, and the University of Melbourne.