Elleke Boehmer wins prestigious ESSE English literature prize

Published on
Wednesday 31 August 2016
Category
College & Community
Wolfson People

Professor Boehmer is Director of The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and a Governing Body Fellow and Deputy Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW) at Wolfson College. The European Society for the Study of English (ESSE) awards this prize biennially and entries are judged by a transEuropean jury of English language and literature academics. 

Professor Boehmer's book, Indian Arrivals 1870-1915: Networks of British Empire, was one of five shortlisted books in her category for literatures in the English language. The award is open to recently published books, focusing on scholarly research in the field of English studies.

In Indian Arrivals, Professor Boehmer explores the rich and complicated landscape of intercultural contact between Indians and Britons on British soil at the height of empire, as reflected in a range of literary writing, including poetry and life-writing. Focussing on a range of remarkable Indian ‘arrivants' -- scholars, poets, religious seekers, and political activists including Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu, Mohandas Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore -- Indian Arrivals examines the take-up in the metropolis of the influences and ideas that accompanied their transcontinental movement, including concepts of the west and of cultural decadence, of urban modernity and of cosmopolitan exchange.