The Southern Lives Network at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing was convened by Professor Elleke Boehmer and Dr Katherine Collins, and rises out of Professor Boehmer’s British Academy funded Southern Imagining and Tracing Southern Latitudes projects and Dr Collins’s Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. The Network brings together writers and scholars in the oceanic humanities, postcolonial, and polar studies, to explore how the high southern latitudes are imagined through life-writing.
We were interested in how southern worlds are often seen as interconnected or in relation to each other, including in biography, memoir and auto-fiction. This reciprocity forms an important part of the imaginative mapping that life-writing stimulates.
Our inaugural workshop took place in December 2020, when we heard snapshot presentations on subjects ranging from the lives of icebergs to African beach portraiture and water spirit narratives in South Africa. Twenty scholars from around the world participated, including from Argentina, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Australia. This was followed by other workshops in 2021 and 2022.
In 2024 our essay collection, Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere, was published by Bloomsbury Academic. Influenced by the workshops we organised, especially an object handling session in the Pitt Rivers, I found myself reflecting on something more fundamental: the prevailing idea of lines, both physical and conceptual, that apparently divide the north from the south. Read more on ResearchGate…
Katherine Collins 
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