21 Facts About Elleke Boehmer

Elleke Boehmer, FRSL, FRHistS was born on 1961 and is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, and a Professorial Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College.

Elleke Boehmer is an acclaimed novelist and a founding figure in the field of Postcolonial Studies, internationally recognised for her research in colonial and postcolonial literature, history and theory.

Elleke Boehmer was born to Dutch parents in Durban, South Africa, in what she has called the "balmy interstitial zone" where the littoral cultures of the Indian Ocean meet in an African city.

Elleke Boehmer studied towards a degree in English and Modern languages in the Eastern Cape, followed by an incomplete year of studying medicine.

Elleke Boehmer completed an MPhil degree in English Literature 1900 to the present, followed by a doctoral thesis on gendered constructions of the nation in post-independence West and East African literature, both at St John's College.

Elleke Boehmer taught at St John's College and then at the Universities of Exeter, Leeds, and Nottingham Trent before her appointment as Hildred Carlile Professor of Literature in English at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Elleke Boehmer has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 2005.

Elleke Boehmer's work has been seen as foundational to the fields of colonial and postcolonial studies, British colonial history, and understandings of nation, narration and gender.

Elleke Boehmer's approach is notable for how she explores postcolonial questions of home, belonging, migration and translation through the modes both of literary criticism and creative writing.

Elleke Boehmer closes by turning to contemporary women's, indigenous, and migrant postcolonial literatures, and makes the crucial argument that, despite criticisms of such writing for being oriented towards Western markets, "the audacious crossing of different perspectives in post-imperial writing can work as an anti-colonial strategy".

Postcolonial literatures, Elleke Boehmer argues, are particularly suited to evoking such a response due to their characteristic interest in margins, intersections, subversions, and crossings.

Elleke Boehmer has described the novel as a dialogue not only with two of the writers most important to her, Joseph Conrad and Chinua Achebe, but with the women who gave interviews to her on miscarriage.

Terence Cave argues that the "strikingly original structure" of Elleke Boehmer's fiction creates a "slow-burn effect" for the reader through which emotional and political truths steadily unfold.

In 2010, Elleke Boehmer published a collection of short stories, Sharmilla, and Other Portraits.

Elleke Boehmer is Professorial Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford.

Elleke Boehmer took over the role of Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing from Professor Dame Hermione Lee in 2017 and is the Executive Director.

Elleke Boehmer was Principal Investigator of the John Fell-funded "Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds" project, which explored the question of how we read Black British and British Asian writing.

Elleke Boehmer is co-convener of Oxford's TORCH-funded "Race and Resistance in the Long Nineteenth Century" network.

Elleke Boehmer is a trustee of the Charlie Perkins Scholarships, an Australian-British organisation established in 2010, named after activist Charlie Perkins, which funds the postgraduate study of Aboriginal Australian students at Oxford and Cambridge.

Elleke Boehmer was the founding chair, in 1988, of Rhodes Scholars Against Apartheid, and, in the same year, co-established, with Kumi Naidoo, the Bram Fischer Memorial Lecture series.

Elleke Boehmer published several highly-cited articles on narrative-based intervention rising from the workshops that she led.