Smriti Verma

Smriti Verma
DPhil Candidate
Wolfson College
smriti.verma@wolfson.ox.ac.uk

Thesis Title: Beyond Authenticity: Narrative Form and Critical Feminist Engagement in Contemporary Women's Autofiction, 2010-2022

Supervisor: Prof. Elleke Boehmer

Doctoral Research: My research examines the construction of narrative form in contemporary women's autofiction to consider what insights it might bring to existing debates on narrative theory, women's writing, and the core issues which tie contemporary female authorship to its narrativization. Women's autobiographies have previously been studied as testimony, bearing upon gendered experiences of trauma and empowerment which sacrifice attention to narrative form to privilege a reading of authenticity. This project studies narrativity as a part of tangible feminist praxis in the works of Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy, Xiaolu Guo and Doireann Ní Ghríofa, analysing how autofiction reinterprets postfeminist debates on community, labour and identity. My research is supported by the Foundation Grant and the Jennifer Ashworth Award by Funds for Women Graduates.

At Oxford, I co-convened the Memory Studies Reading Group, funded as a Critical Thinking Community by TORCH, and worked as a Non-Fiction Editor for Oxford Research in English, and as a DPhil Representative at the English Graduates at Oxford (EGO) Committee. I'm a Postgraduate Member of the Rothermere American Institute. I volunteer with the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, and am a Junior Dean at Green Templeton College.

Teaching

I have experience teaching FHS Paper 6 (Writing Lives and Silences) at the Faculty of English as a Graduate Teaching Assistant and as a Tutor on Visiting Student Programmes at Brasenose, Hertford, Exeter, St. Catherine's and Worcester College. My teaching experience includes: life-writing, contemporary literature, postcolonial literature, contemporary British women's fiction, and memory studies. I've been a TMS mentee for Prelims Paper 4 Literature in English 1910-present day and and a dissertation supervisor for FHS Paper 7 on Joan Didion's writing on California. 

I'm open to teaching opportunities and dissertation supervision, especially for papers ranging from 1910-present day for modern and contemporary women's writing, gender studies and autobiography.

Research Interests: life-writing, autobiography, gender studies, feminist theory, world literature, postcolonial studies, narratology, contemporary novel

Links to my creative and academic writing can be found on my website.

I can be found here on twitter: @smritiverma__

Publications:

  • "Lessons in Resemblance; or attempts to (un)mask." Creative Critical, June 2025, https://creativecritical.net/lessons-in-resemblance-or-attempts-to-unmas....
  • "(Re)defining Metaphorical Address: Female Disability, Embodiment and Agency in Jerry Pinto's Em and the Big Hoom (2012)." Retrieving the Crip Outsider, edited by Someshwari Sati. Bloomsbury, 2024.
  • "Motif and Meaning: Hijrat in Intizar Husain's Basti (1979)." (Re)Writing The Margins, edited by Aparna Singh. PAIOLCK, 2019.