Dr Martha Swift is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute and Junior Research Fellow in the Humanities at St Catherine’s College. Her research examines concepts of ‘worldliness’ and interrogates the relationship between World Literature and American Literature through genres such as autofiction and the literary Western.

Her current project is about the way that contemporary writers of the American West—novelists, poets, playwrights and illustrators—in the United States and around the world are reworking 150 years of the Western’s history, engaging long histories of travel, transnational authorship and global interconnectedness in the region and for the genre. As part of this project, Martha is running a network and book group about the invention of ‘westness’ for early-career and doctoral researchers with support from the British Association for American Studies Development Fund. Please get in touch if you would like to be involved.

Martha is also finalising her first monograph, The World of American Autofiction, which uses the frameworks and theory of world literature to explores how a selection of multiethnic and diasporic North American writers use autofiction to explore transnational interconnection and to reflect on their writerly responsibilities within global networks.

Her work has been supported by the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission, the Rothermere American Institute, and the University of Melbourne. Her research and writing has been published by Contemporary Literature, Bloomsbury, creativecritical.net, It’s Freezing in LA!, SENT, and Meanji

Martha received her DPhil from Oxford’s Faculty of English in 2024. She also has an MSt in World Literatures from Oxford and a BA(Hons) from the University of Melbourne. In 2025, she was a Visiting Fellow at the United States Study Center at the University of Sydney.