Martha Swift is a Junior Research Fellow at St Catherine's College and a Fellow of 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. 

As part of her current project, "The World and the Western," Martha is running a network and book group about the invention of ‘westness’ for early-career and doctoral researchers with support from the British Association for American Studies Development Fund. Please get in touch if you would like to be involved.

Martha 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. In 2025, she was a Visiting Scholar at the United States Study Centre at the University of Sydney and, in 2021, was guest lecturer at the UK's Architectural Association School of Architecture. She has also been invited to speak at the Universities of Oxford and Toronto, and she has given outreach lectures for the British Association of American Studies. 

Martha has taught modern and contemporary literature and postcolonial and world literatures at the University of Oxford since 2022, and she supervises both undergraduate and master's dissertations.