Research | Martha Swift

Martha Swift is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. Her research examines on the relationship between World Literature and American Literature through genres such as autofiction and the literary Western. She is interested in competing definitions of 'world' and the textual performance of collaborative literary production, as well as ecocritism and contemporary women's writing.

She was previously a Commonwealth Scholar, a fourth-year doctoral scholar at the Rothermere American Institute, and a recipient of the Rae and Edith Bennet Travelling Scholarship from the University of Melbourne.

Martha was also a consultant on the ERC-funded TRACTION project in 2021/22, contributing to the design of a teacher-training module on race, belonging, empire, and migration in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.

Publications

'New Wave, New Waste: Expanding Waste Studies with Chinese Science Fiction.' Contemporary Literature 65, no. 3 (Spring 2025).

Review: 'Inherited Silence: Listening to the Land, Healing the Colonizer Mind, by Louise Dunlap.' FEMSPEC 23, 2 (2023), 146 - 151.

''The Praline Woman' by Alice Dunbar Nelson.' Ten-Minute Book Club. Faculty of English, University of Oxford. October 2022.

'Another Crime, An Other Criminal: detecting the criminal other in the Sign of Four and Red Dragon.' The Undergraduate Library. Global Undergraduate Awards: Highly Commended, 2018.

Lectures & Invited Talks

Martha was most recently hosted at the United States Study Center at the University of Sydney, where she gave a paper titled 'Animals Out of Place: the World in the American West' that discussed the significance of dislocated and distemporalised animals to a global sense of place in contemporary Westerns.

In 2024, Martha presented a research paper on 'Autofiction and/as World Literature' at Oxford's Postcolonial and World Literatures Seminar, and she was invited to the University of Toronto to speak at a graduate work in progress session through the Oxford-Penn-Toronto International Doctoral Cluster in the Environmental Humanities.

Her work on waste and science fiction has also been featured in a Research Spotlight session at the University of Toronto's Collaborative Digital Research Space: Discourses of Futurity and Sustainability Across the Environmental Humanities.