Martha Swift is a final-year doctoral student in the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on contemporary autofiction in conversation with theories of world literature. She is interested in temporal definitions of 'world' and the textual performance of collaborative literary production, as well as ecocritism and contemporary women's writing.
She is a current Commonwealth Scholar, a fourth-year doctoral scholar at the Rothermere American Institute, and a previous recipient of the Rae and Edith Bennet Travelling Scholarship.
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.
Conferences & Invited Talks
Martha was most recently hosted at Oxford's Postcolonial and World Literatures Seminar, where she gave a paper titled 'Autofiction and/as World Literature' to an audience of 60+. It examined Ruth Ozeki's treatment of 3/11 and the transpacific spread of risk awareness in A Tale for the Time Being.
In March 2024, Martha 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.
Her other conference presentations include:
"Reading the Dictionary in Tara June Winch’s The Yield and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers". American Comparative Literature Association Convention, Montreal 2024.
“Nostalgia and the Other in Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife”. Oxford Astor Visiting Fellowship Workshop with Dorothy Hale (UC Berkeley). October 2023.
'Arcs and Spirals: Narrating Climate Crisis with the Gyre in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being'. Forum Session: 'Planetary Lives' at the Modern Language Association Convention, San Francisco, January 2023.
‘Autofiction as World(-)Literature: on writing women and cosmopolitical genre in Ruth Ozeki’s autofictions’. Women in World(-)Literature, University of Warwick, June 2022.
‘‘'Hold your story lightly’: reading the relations between reader, writer, and character in Ruth Ozeki’s autofictions". Experimental Life-Writing, University of Wrocław, Poland, April 2022.
Publication forthcoming.
“‘Imagine the Pacific’: Autofiction and the ‘world risk society’ in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being”. Fiction in the Age of Globalization, University of Tübingen, 20 June 2021.
Publications
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.
