Professor Elleke Boehmer FRSL, FRHISTS

Elleke Boehmer (English Language and Literature, 1985) has had a long and distinguished academic career, teaching at a number of universities in the UK before returning to Oxford as its first Professor in World Literature in English in 2007. She was instrumental in establishing the English Faculty’s very successful MSt in World Literature strand. She is an internationally recognised specialist in African and Indian postcolonial writing and has recently become Director of the Oxford Centre for Life Writing at Wolfson College, supported by the Dorset Foundation (2018– ), a world-leading research centre.

Professor Boehmer 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.