Dr Martha Swift

Contact: martha.swift [at] ell.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests: world literature; autofiction; contemporary literature; transnationalism; cosmopolitanism; environmental humanities; ecocriticism; waste
 

My current book project, which emerges from my doctoral research, connects the rapidly growing fields of autofiction and World Literature. Through close readings of autofictions by several multiethnic American authors, it examines how the mode redefines world literature as worldmaking literature; destabilises a dominant American perspective in the field; and challenges dismissals of women’s autofiction as self-absorbed by exploring representations of literary practice as a collective response to globalising events.

I also write and lecture on animal life in literary westerns, part of a new project begun as a Visiting Fellow at the United States Study Center at the University of Sydney in 2025.

Selected Publications: 

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 (Spring 2025). Available: https://doi.org/10.3368/cl.65.3.388

Swift, Martha. “On Creating the Conditions for (Creating) Criticism.” In What Is Creative Criticism? A Field Report on a Colloquium: Oxford, June 2024. Edited by Joe Moshenska and Iris Pearson. June 2025. https://creativecritical.net/on-creating-the-conditions-for-creating-cri...