My research examines concepts of ‘worldliness’ and interrogates the relationship between World Literature and American Literature through genres such as autofiction and the literary Western.
My 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, I am 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.
I am also finalising my 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.
I received my DPhil from Oxford in 2024, with a Commonwealth Scholarship and fourth-year funding from the Rothermere American Institute. In 2025, I was a Visiting Fellow at the United States Study Center at the University of Sydney.
My recent academic publications include:
Swift, Martha. “‘Plagiarising the World’: author-audience interactions and collective world-building in Olivia Laing’s Crudo”. In Narrative Co-Construction: Author-Audience Interactions and Narrative Theory, Eds Malcah Effron, Margarida McMurray and Virginia Pignagnoli. Theory and Interpretation of Narrative Series. Ohio State University Press. September 2026.
Swift, Martha. “Autofiction”. In Experimental Life Writing, Eds. Wojciech Drag and Vanessa Guignery. New Directions in Life Narrative. Bloomsbury, October 2025.
Swift, Martha. “New Wave, New Waste: Expanding Waste Studies with Chinese Science Fiction.” Contemporary Literature 65, no. 3 (June 2025). Available: https://doi.org/10.3368/cl.65.3.388
I have taught courses in postcolonial and world literatures, American fiction, and contemporary literature at Oxford and at the University of Sydney. I also teach writing and research skills for undergraduate and postgraduate students. I am open to master’s supervision.
