Lena Elisabeth Leßlhumer

Hello, my name is Lena Elisabeth Leßlhumer and I am very excited to join the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW) in June 2025 as a Visiting Doctoral Student. I am currently a doctoral candidate and university lecturer at the Department of English and American Studies at the Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, Austria. At my home institution, I am also affiliated with the doctoral school Popular Cultural Studies. I hold a MA in teaching, i.e. the subjects English and History, Social Studies and Political Education, from the University of Salzburg in the course of which I have also completed the extra-curricular Migration Studies. As a university lecturer, I teach introductory and undergraduate classes in Literature and Cultural Studies, such as the proseminars “Understanding Poetry” (winter term 2024/25) and “Postcolonialism and Life Writing” (summer term 2025).

My research interests are within Anglophone literary and cultural studies, Black studies, life writing, colonial, postcolonial and neocolonial studies, transnational and migration studies, which is reflected in my four-year dissertation project “Ours is the struggle of a lifetime, or maybe even many lifetimes”. Here I examine how trauma, complexities of lived experiences and questions of agency are depicted in Black life writing, with a particular focus on autobiographies and memoirs, in the US and UK from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Based on the postcolonial notion of writing back, I investigate how Black authors of life writings, not only have impacted social movements and vice versa, but also how they have reclaimed their agency by “moving from silence into speech” (hooks 1986: 9). Therefore, I consider life writing to be well-suited to support arguments on behalf of people who have been oppressed or traditionally silenced (cf. Smith 2001: 28). Furthermore, I suggest that this genre also supports “the need to define the individual ‘black self’ to a society that denied the existence of black reality” (cf. Franklin 1995: 12).

I am thrilled to return to the University of Oxford two years after I have participated in the short academic program “Writing Lives” at the Lady Margaret Hall (LMH) and I am looking forward to conducting parts of my research at the OCLW this June.