Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshop: Elleke Boehmer & Katherine Collins, 'Life-writing and the Far South: Rhythm, Disruption, and Sensory Extremes’

Laura Marcus Life-Writing Workshop: Elleke Boehmer & Katherine Collins

 ‘Life-writing and the far south: rhythm, disruption, and sensory extremes’

In their co-edited Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere (2024), and other work since, Elleke Boehmer and Katherine Collins consider the challenges of life-writing in the face of environmental and technological instability. In this workshop we will discuss how different rhythms, temporalities, and forms of unpredictability shape the ways lives are written and imagined in the icy environments of Antarctica, a setting of faltering communication, volatile weather, disrupted circadian cycles, and extreme sensory experience.

Speaker Details:

Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English and OCLW Executive Director. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society. She is a Fellow at Wolfson College and an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford. Since 2023, she has been an Extraordinary Professor in English at the University of Pretoria. She is the author of seven monographs including Postcolonial Poetics, Indian Arrivals (2015-16 ESSE prize-winner), Stories of Women and Southern Imagining (2025). Boehmer’s fiction includes Ice Shock, To the Volcano, and The Shouting in the Dark (Olive Schreiner Prize-winner 2018). Her work has been translated into many languages, including German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, Thai and Mandarin.

Katherine Collins is a researcher in the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College. Her research interests include creative practice as research, critical pedagogies and research cultures. She has published on the intersections of research and poetry, and fiction and the archive. Her current project explores more-than-human stories of Antarctica. Her poetry has appared in Propel Magazine, The Rialto, bath magg, Shearsman Magazine, and Finished Creatures, among others. In 2022, her collaboration ‘They multiply their wings’, with composer Christopher Cook, won the Rosamond Prize and in 2023 her poem ‘Islands in silence’ was highly commended in the Plough Prize.

Preparation:

To be confirmed. 

Further Details and Contacts:

This is an in-person event and will not be recorded.

NOTE: this event takes place at the new Schwarzman Centre, not the St Cross building.

Registration is required and will close one week before the event (17:30 on 14 November). Confirmations of successful registration will be sent out one week before the event.

Please note that this event is exclusively open to current members of the University of Oxford. Workshop places will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis, with priority given to members of the English Faculty. 

Queries regarding this event should be addressed to Charles Pidgeon.