Dr Martha Swift

Dr Martha Swift is a Visiting Scholar at the United States Studies Centre, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and Coordinator of the Environmental Humanities Research Hub at the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities.

At USSC, she is working on a new project about Westerns in contemporary fiction and film. “Animals Out of Place: the American West in the twenty-first century” examines the recent resurgence of the Western genre and the importance of non-native animals to its feminist and internationalising adaptations. It explores diasporic authorship, discussions of national identity, and the entanglement of both with the non-human world.

She is concurrently 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.

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.