Dorothee Boulanger

Dorothée is a Career Development Fellowship in Women’s, Gender and Sexualities Studies in the Humanities division. As such, her academic responsibilities lie mostly with the MSt in Women’s, Gender and Sexualities Studies, where Dorothée teaches the core module Feminist Approaches to Research, with Prof. Sneha Krishnan, as well as two option classes: Natural Women? Gender and the Environment and Crossing Fiction and Theory: African women writers and African feminism in conversation. She is also a Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College.

Dorothée’s research interests lie at the intersection of African literatures, histories and cosmologies, highlighting how Western methodologies and academic disciplines fail to grasp the complexity of African fiction as an intellectual and political intervention. Dorothée’s research encompasses a wide range of African fiction, mostly in Portuguese, as well as French and English, with a particular interest in gender and feminism, environmental and ecocritical perspectives, and all things Angola-related.

Based on her doctoral dissertation, her first book, Fiction as History: Resistance and Complicities in Angolan Postcolonial Literature (Legenda, 2022) examines Angolan novels as historical sources. It argues that Angolan writers’ specific standpoint as members of the nationalist elite make their literary contribution privileged sources to investigate power structures in postcolonial Angola. On the other  hand, it also shows how this very proximity led to certain blindspots in fictional accounts of Angola’s history, like the systematic centring of male voices, experiences and perspectives as well as an ambivalent relation to the postcolonial regime. This book has been translated in Portuguese, thanks to the generous support of Jesus College, and has been published in Portugal by Mercado de Letras. It is also available for free on Africae’s website, an open-access publisher specialising in African Studies

Dorothée joined the University of Oxford in 2018 as a departmental Lecturer for the Portuguese sub-faculty, focusing on African Literatures in Portuguese.

In 2020, she was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship with Oxford’s Faculty of Modern Languages, as well as a Junior Research Fellowship at Jesus College, for her project ‘Contemporary Griots: Writing the Revolution in Contemporary Africa’, which proposes to use the West African figure of the griot as a conceptual device to look comparatively at the postcolonial literature of Zimbabwe, Angola, Algeria and the Congo (Brazzaville), examining the literary legacies of revolution and internal conflict in postcolonial Africa. During that time, she published, with Susanne Gehrmann, the first edited collection in French on African queer arts and activism : Esthétiques et activismes queer dans les arts et littératures africaines (Karthala, 2024).

More recently, pressed by the acceleration of global warming and multiple environmental crises, Dorothée has developed a sustained interest in ecocritical perspectives and non-human agency in African and Lusophone Literatures, revising the Luso-African literary canon through an ecocritical lens. She investigates how fiction, through the centring of alternative cosmologies and epistemologies, can celebrate and inspire more sustainable and respectful relations to the Earth and the living.