From 2007-10 Elleke Boehmer worked as Co-Investigator, with PI Professor Susheila Nasta of the Open University and a group of postdoctoral researchers, on a large AHRC-funded project ‘South Asians Making Britain' which investigated the many rich South Asian contributions to British social, cultural and political life in the period 1870-1950. The team explored inter alia Indian students' lives in Britain, in particular Oxbridge and London, the experience of Indian Sepoys on the Western front, and the involvement of Indian intellectuals, artists, and writers in the formation of a pre-War avant-garde.  The outcomes of the project included a final international conference, the March 2010 Bodleian exhibition ‘Indian Traces in Oxford’, a large database about key individuals and developments in Indian migration to Britain, and several essays and books.  

Since September 2010 Elleke has been working on a cultural history of the early phase of Indian migration to Britain, entitled India Arrived, which explores what it means to arrive in a ‘foreign’ culture to which however all an individual’s education and training has conditioned them to belong.  This study has been part-funded by an AHRC research leave award.  From November 2011 Elleke Boehmer is Oxford’s English Faculty representative on a large ITN-Marie Curie funded research project in collaboration with the Universities of Muenster, SOAS, Northampton and Mumbai, as well as Oxford’s COMPAS Centre, exploring, inter alia, narratives of diaspora and other questions of diasporic identity.  A Postdoctoral Fellow will work with Elleke on this project within the English Faculty from 2012.  

Professor Boehmer currently supervises DPhil/PhD students working on: 

The Victorian Novel and Empire

The Posthuman in contemporary American Literature

A Comparative Study of Ugandan and Southern African women’s writing

Ethics in the Postcolonial Novel (Ghosh, Adichie, Phillips, Ishiguro)

States of Hope in the South Asian Novel

The Document in Modernist Writing

Anglophone Literature of the Indian Ocean

A Comparative Biography of WB Yeats and Rudyard Kipling

The Middle Eastern Novel and Transnationalism

The Child Figure in African Literature

Influence and Anxiety in Antiguan Writing

Nostalgia in Southern African Writing

Kipling and Schreiner-architectures of empire

Third culture writing

Elleke Boehmer has published the internationally cited Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford UP, 1995; 2nd edn 2005), and an acclaimed monograph investigating transnational links between anti-colonial movements, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890-1920 (Oxford UP, 2002; paperback 2004).

In 2005 she published a study of the influential intersections between nationalist, postcolonial and feminist thought Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation (Manchester UP). The monograph appeared from Manchester UP in paperback in the summer of 2009.

In the summer of 2008 she published the cultural history, Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction (OUP).

She has edited the anthology Empire Writing, 1870-1918 and, more recently, the British bestseller Scouting for Boys, Robert Baden-Powell's primer of the Scout movement (2004; pb 2005), as well as Cornelia Sorabji's 1934 India Calling (with Naella Grew: Trent Editions, 2004).

She has co-edited collections of essays on transnationalism, the new South Africa (1990 and 2005), and on questions in postcolonial aesthetics. A collection of critical essays on Terror and the Postcolonial, rising from the successful 2006 British Academy supported workshops, co-organised with Dr Stephen Morton, appeared from Wiley-Blackwell in 2009.

A collection, J.M. Coetzee in Context and Theory, co-edited with Robert Eaglestone and Katy Iddiols, was out from Continuum in 2009.

Elleke Boehmer has published four well-received novels, Screens Against the Sky (1990: shortlisted David Higham Prize); An Immaculate Figure (1993), Bloodlines (2000: shortlisted Sanlam Prize), and Nile Baby (Ayebia, 2008), as well as a number of short stories in journals, magazines, and anthologies. Her most recent stories include ‘Fold’ published in STAND in 2009; and ‘It’s OK’, an AIDS story to be published in Flash Fiction 1. Nile Baby explores the deeply embedded presences of Africa in Britain. Sharmilla, and Other Portraits (Jacana, 2010) is her first collection of short stories.

Articles published by Elleke Boehmer between 2005 and 2010 include:

"First realise your need": Manju Kapur's Erotic Nation'. Alternative Indias : Cultural Diversity in Contemporary Literature in English. Edited by Peter Morey and Alex Tickell. Amsterdam . Rodopi. 2005.

'Postcolonialism'. In The Theory and Practice of Literary Criticism: An Oxford Guide. Edited by Patricia Waugh. Oxford UP. 2005.

'Postcolonial Terrorist: The Case of Nelson Mandela'. Parallax 37.2005.

'Sorry, sorrier, sorriest: The Gendering of Contrition in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace'. J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual. Edited by Jane Poyner. Athens . Ohio UP. 2006.

'Response to Caryl Phillips'. The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2004. Oxford . Oxford UP. 2006.

‘Postcolonial writing and Terror', Wasafiri 22 (July 2007). Special issue: Cultures of Terror. pp. 1-4.

‘Asexual and Anal: Baden-Powell and the Boy Scouts'. Oxford History of Medicine, volume 4. Edited by George Rousseau. Palgrave Macmillan. 2007.

Here nor There'. Published as ‘Hier noch dort: Schreiben auberhalf der Muttersprache'. Exophonie: Anders-Sprachligkeit (in) der Literatur. Edited by Susan Arndt, D. Naguschewski, R. Stockhammer. Berlin . Kadmos Verlag. 2007.

‘Motherlands, mothers and nationalist sons: theorizing the en-gendered nation'. Empire and Nation. Ed. Stephen Howe. Oxford UP. 2007.

Introduction. Re-issue of African Writers Series classic The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta. Oxford. Pearson Publishers. 2008. pp. i-vii.

'Edward Said and (the postcolonial occlusion of) Gender'. Edward Said and the Literary, Social and Political World. Edited by Ranjan Ghosh. Preface Benita Parry. NY. SUNY Press. 2009. pp. 124-136.

'Postcolonial Writing and Terror'. French translation, Littérature, ed. T. Todorov, trans. Martin Mégevand. 2009.

With Frances Gouda. 'Postcolonial Studies and the Diasporic Netherlands'. Comparing Postcolonial Diasporas. Edited by James Procter, David Murphy and Michelle Keown. Basingstoke. Palgrave Macmillan. 2009.

'The Postcolonial Aesthetic'.  Re-Routing the Postcolonial. Edited by Janet Wilson et al.  Routledge.  2010.

• Of Memory and Monsters’.  Interview on recent fictional work with Zoe Norridge (York).  Oxford Postcolonial Seminar.  10 November 2011.<http://mediapodcasts.ox.ac.uk/engfac/great-writers/2011-11-10-engfac-greatwriters-questions.mp3>
• ‘Kim Writ Large’.  The worlding of Kipling’s Ideas in Baden-Powell’s Boy Scout Movement’.  Rudyard Kipling, An International Writer Conference.  University of Kent/IES, Senate House. 21-22 October 2011. 
• British Academy chair and panelist.  With Catherine Hall, Marina Warner.  ‘End of Empire and the English Novel’. 2 November 2011.
• Visiting Professor lectures. ‘Putting the Aesthetic Back In’ and ‘Nile Baby’s African roots’.  Monash University, Melbourne.  3, 6 October 2011.
• Public lecture.  Annual KulturTheorien Series.  ‘Postcolonial Studies in the 21st Century: The Response to Regions’.  University of Stuttgart and City of Stuttgart.  20 July 2011. 

In January 2012 Elleke Boehmer will give a keynote lecture ‘Writing a Novel from Life’, in which she will be speaking as both writer and critic.  This will be at the First Fictions Conference, University of Sussex.  In the course of 2012 she is also due to give lectures in Berlin, Copenhagen, Johannesburg, and Utrecht.