Dr Nelson Mlambo

Dr Nelson Mlambo is a literature and cultural theories researcher. He is currently an AfOx TORCH Visiting Fellow at the English Faculty, University of Oxford, as part of the Africa Oxford Visiting Fellowship Programme. 

Dr Mlambo is a leading scholar of postcolonial African literature with a specialism in Southern African writing, mainly focusing on Zimbabwe and Namibia. He has over forty peer-reviewed publications and a significant record of contribution to his field as a researcher and a teacher. His research interests are African literature and theory, Afrocentrism, Afro-triumphalism, health communication and intercultural communication studies. He is a Senior Lecturer in Literature at the Faculty of Education and Humanities at the University of Namibia. 

Dr Mlambo’s research explores how the literary manifestations of conflict in fiction offer creative/imaginative presentations of reality which can form the basis for negotiating restorative justice and peaceful co-existence. His work seeks to understand how narratives can help us to think of and understand the local and global ramifications of genocides. In his research nelson investigates how truth and memory survivor narratives shape dreams for peaceful and prosperous co-existence through valorising indigenous knowledge systems that characterise human-nature interdependencies and how narratives can project modalities of viewing gender and natural landscapes as sites of survival and future-making.  

While in Oxford, he will work on the research project: “Literary Archives of Conflict for Peaceful and Prosperous Societies: Memory, Truth and Faction About the Herero/Nama Atrocities in Namibia.” Nelson’s project seeks to explore the often-overlooked dimensions of the Herero/Nama characteristics in the discussions about the conflict: their agency, resilience, and ability to survive. These qualities have been silenced in discourses of colonial conflict, and the project will argue that to build democratic futures of equality and humane considerations, such positive qualities of the victims need to be registered. The project will use trauma and resilience theory, postcolonial ecocriticism, and thoughts from memory studies to argue how modes of representation help reflect genocidal historiography and how global futures of peace can be imagined and conceived.  

Dr Mlambo will be an AfOx-TORCH Visiting Fellow during Trinity Term, 2023. His academic host will be Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, Faculty of English