Elleke Boehmer

Who is Elleke Boehmer?

Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, and a Professorial Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College. She is an acclaimed novelist and a founding figure in the field of Postcolonial Studies, internationally recognized for her research in colonial and postcolonial literature and theory. Her main areas of interest include the literature of empire and resistance to empire; sub-Saharan African and South Asian literatures; modernism; migration and diaspora; feminism, masculinity, and identity; nationalism; terrorism; J.M. Coetzee, Katherine Mansfield, and Nelson Mandela; and life writing.

With her fiction, Boehmer has established an international reputation as a commentator on the aftereffects of colonial history, in particular in post-apartheid South Africa and postcolonial Britain.