Honorary Fellow elected to the Australian Academy of the Humanities

In November 2025, the Australian Academy of the Humanities announced the election of 30 new Fellows. Election to the Academy is the highest honour in the humanities in Australia, recognising exceptional scholars whose work has shaped how Australia understands its history, culture, and place in the world.

Professor Elleke Boehmer was elected as a Corresponding Fellow of the Academy, in recognition of her contributions to colonial and postcolonial literary studies, and her research in the anglophone literatures of empire and anti-empire.

Professor Boehmer is the University's first Professor in World Literature in English and Executive Director of the Oxford Centre for Life Writing, Wolfson College. She is an internationally recognised colonial, postcolonial and world literature specialist with prominent southern hemisphere interests. Professor Boehmer was elected to an Honorary Fellowship at St John's in 2022 and is also an Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society.

Professor Boehmer is the author of six published monographs to date, with the seventh, Southern Imagining: a literary and cultural history of the far southern hemisphere, forthcoming with Princeton UP in December. She is also a well-known author of fiction; her five critically acclaimed novels and two collections of short stories, many set in southern Africa and the Global South, have won numerous prizes and have been translated into a range of languages.

Congratulations, Elleke! For more information about the new Australian Academy Fellows see here.