Elleke Boehmer

Elleke Boehmer (born 1961) 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 recognised 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.

Elleke Boehmer was born to Netherlands parents in Durban, South Africa, in what she has called the "balmy interstitial zone" where the littoral cultures of the Indian Ocean meet in an African city. She studied towards a degree in English and Modern languages in the Eastern Cape, followed by an incomplete year of studying medicine. In this period, she became profoundly influenced by the Black Consciousness thought of the activist doctor Steve Biko. After a year and a half of teaching English in Mamelodi township, outside Tswane in what is now Gauteng, she won a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford. She completed an MPhil degree in English Literature 1900 to the present, followed by a doctoral thesis on gendered constructions of the nation in post-independence West and East African literature, both at St. John's College. In 1990, she published her first novel, the bildungsroman Screens Against the Sky. She taught at St John's College and then at the Universities of Exeter, Leeds, and Nottingham Trent before her appointment as Hildred Carlile Professor of Literature in English at Royal Holloway, University of London. Since 2007, she has held the Professorship of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford.

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