Dorothee Boulanger

dorothee photo pro
Career Development Fellow in Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies
dorothee.boulanger@humanities.ox.ac.uk

Role

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

 

She is currently employed by the Humanities Division on a Career Development Fellowship in Women’s, Gender and Sexualities Studies. 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. Jane Garnett, as well as two self-designed options: 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.

 

She is the co-editor in chief of the open-access academic journal Sources: Materials and Fieldwork in African Studies, and the founder of the African Languages, Literatures and Cultures TORCH network.

 

Dorothée’s research interests lie at the intersection of African literatures, histories and cosmologies, highlighting how Western methodologies and academic disciplines fail to encompass the complexity of African fiction as an intellectual and political intervention. Dorothée’s research encompasses a wide range of African fiction in Portuguese, French and English, with a particular interest in gender, masculinities and ecocriticism.

 

Based on her doctoral dissertation at King's College London, 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. The Portuguese translation of her book, Ficção como história, (Africae, Mercado de Letras), is available open access on Africae's website.

 

In 2020, Dorothée 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. Beyond Angola, she started publishing in lusophone and anglophone writers from Southern Africa, such as Dambudzo Marechera, Yvonne Vera and Paulina Chiziane.

 

More recently, pressed by the acceleration of global warming and multiple environmental crises, Dorothée has developed a sustained interest in ecocritical perspectives and more-than-human agency in African and Lusophone Literatures, often working alongside Andrzej Stuart-Thompson. 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.

 

In 2022, Dorothée has been presented with an Award for Excellence by the University’s Humanities Division for her work as an ECR representative from 2020 to 2022.

 

Monograph

  • Fiction as History: Resistance and Complicities in Angolan Postcolonial Literature. Under contract with MHRA publisher Legenda, forthcoming Autumn 2022.
  • A ficção como história. (Africae / Mercado de Letras / Universidade Católica de Angola, 2025). Traduction portugaise de Fiction as History, disponible en open access sur le site d’Africae : https://books.openedition.org/africae/2670

Edited collections / Special Issue

  • ‘Luso-Ecologies: Ecocritical Perspectives on Lusophone Arts and Literatures’ dossier thématique de Portuguese Studies, 41 (1), ed. by Dorothée Boulanger et Andrzej Stuart-Thompson, forthcoming 2025.
  • Esthétiques et activismes queer dans les arts et littératures africaines, ed. by Dorothée Boulanger and Susanne Gehrmann (Karthala, 2024).
  • ‘L’Angola au XXIe siècle. Imagination collective et production des savoirs’, Special Issue of Lusotopie, ed. by Dorothée Boulanger and António Tomás, XXII (2), 2023.

Forthcoming

  • ‘Decentring the Human in Lusophone Studies’ avec Andrzej Stuart-Thompson, introduction to the special issue « Luso-Ecologies: Ecocritical Perspectives on Lusophone Arts and Literatures »  for Portuguese Studies 41 (1).
  • ‘Bourgeois Pigs, Magical Goats and Vagabond Dogs: reading Angolan fiction dis-anthropocentrically’, Portuguese Studies 41 (1), for the  special issue "Luso-Ecologies" (see supra).
  • ‘“Exorbitant freedom”- Dambudzo Marechera in Oxford (1974-1976),’ in Race, Belonging and Resistance in Oxford ed. by Stephen Tuck, under contract with Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2025.
  • « ‘Entre Judeus’ : Entre héritage colonial, incarnation national(ist)e et figure victimaire, la figure métisse dans la littérature Angolaise », in Être métis.se dans les Empires, ed. by Françoise Blum, forthcoming 2026.

Chapters/Articles

Other publications