Welcome to our inaugural International Fellow
The School of Humanities is hosting one of the University's inaugural International Fellows, Professor Elleke Boehmer from the University of Oxford, who is one of the world's leading scholars of postcolonial and World literatures.
While in Adelaide, Professor Boehmer is working on a project which looks at the reception and perception of prominent narratives of Australia at home and abroad. In particular the focus is on readings and representations of country, and Country, under different aspects, including sedimentations and products of Country, like dust, and versions of Country such as sea-country and star-country.
"I'm incredibly excited to be here at the University of Adelaide, talking and thinking about starry Australian skies and starry Australian books with some brilliant readers from Humanities and beyond," says Professor Boehmer.
Professor Boehmer will convene a workshop on Southern Stars, and Night Skies in Australian Writing, which will be an engaging, interdisciplinary exploration of the southern celestial wonders and their influence on storytelling in Australia.
This workshop will feature thought-provoking presentations from renowned speakers, including a keynote from Eugenia Flynn (RMIT) discussing personal narratives and critical reflections in writing Country, and a collaborative session with Stephen Muecke and Samuel J. Cox on constellations on the journey to Broome.
An online panel of astrophysicists will delve into the mysteries of observing the far southern skies, followed by a wide-ranging conversation between Lynda Ng and Professor Boehmer on themes in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria. There will also be opportunities to walk to the Art Gallery to view several artworks of southern stars and skies.
Register for the workshop
9:45am - 3:30pm, Thursday 7 November
Writing Studio, Barr Smith Library
For online participation, please join us via the Zoom link
Elleke Boehmer is Professor of World Literature in English and Executive Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at the University of Oxford, UK. She is the author of Postcolonial Poetics (2018), Indian Arrivals 1870–1915: Networks of British Empire (2015; winner of the biennial ESSE prize 2016), Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction (2008, 2023), Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920 (2002), Stories of Women (2005), and the field-defining Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (1995, 2005). Southern Imagining, a literary history of the Southern Hemisphere and her seventh monograph, will appear from Princeton University Press in 2025. Elleke Boehmer is also novelist and short story writer. Her fiction includes To the Volcano, and other stories (2019), her second collection of short stories, and The Shouting in the Dark (2018).