Martha Swift

Supervisor: Professor Ankhi Mukherjee

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

Affiliations: Postgraduate Member & Fourth-Year Scholarship at the Rothermere American Institute; Coordinator at the TORCH Environmental Humanities Research Hub

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

Doctoral Research: My thesis uses frameworks and theory from the field of World Literature to read the autofictional novels, short stories, and films of three contemporary authors: Nicole Krauss, Téa Obreht, and Ruth Ozeki. These writers differently deploy autofiction to address their experiences as ‘authors of formerly hyphenated American ethnicities’ (Leah Milne) and to express a sense of transnational interconnection in the wake of global catastrophes with highly personal consequences. In response, I identify their versions of autofiction as instrumental to the multiple forms of connectivity and collective meaning-making enacted in their writing and thus as fundamental to the world literary qualities of their work. In doing so, I make an unusual argument for their ‘hyphenated’ American literature as world literature that defines the latter as world-making literature.