Dr Martha Swift  is an award-winning writer and researcher. She is a Junior Research Fellow in the Humanities at St Catherine's College at the University of Oxford and a Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute. She was also recently a Visiting Scholar at the United States Study Center at the University of Sydney.

Her doctoral research at the University of Oxford was supported by a Commonwealth Scholarship and a Fourth-Year Doctoral Scholarship at the Rothermere American Institute.

Her first monograph investigates theories of ‘world’ and considers the interaction of autofiction and cosmopolitics in contemporary transnational novels, and her current project explores the relationships between American and World Literature via the literary Western. 

She has designed and led creative writing and storytelling workshops for students in Australia, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom and was previously the Program Manager of the Shanghai International Literary Festival.

Martha has won several prizes for her creative and academic writing. Most recently, her story "The Menagerie" was shortlisted for the 2025 Fish Flash Fiction Prize. Her writing has also appeared in Contemporary Literature, FEMSPEC, SENT, It’s Freezing in LA!, ArtBlog, and Spike: the Meanjin Blog, and she has served on the editorial boards of fiction and creative nonfiction publications at Oxford, the University of Melbourne, and the University of Pennsylvania.