Marella Hoffman is a social and political scientist who takes a 'Big Picture' approach to the individual, their culture and the politics that shape both. Her ten books to date are transdisciplinary and applied. A former Cambridge University academic, Hoffman has lectured or held research awards at universities in France, Switzerland, Ireland and the US, and has worked extensively for government.
As a Fellow of Britain's Royal Anthropological Institute, she uses ethnographic, contemporary oral history to build bridges internationally between academia, communities and public policy decisions. She was for over a decade chief editor of a public policy magazine in Cambridge, UK, communicating policy to poorer communities in 40,000 copies per year. Her projects boosting the democratic participation of communities have been taught as best practice models by government agencies.
A Nature-lover and windsurfer immersed in wind and water, Hoffman boosted her productivity by moving her writing base from cities to a rewilded forest environment in 2018. Some of her resulting work brings communities into dialogue with the more-than-human natural world around them.
Hoffman is now working on the third of her trilogy of books for her main publisher, Routledge, the world’s leading academic publisher in social and political science. The first - Practicing Oral History to Improve Public Policies and Programs - taught how to use ethnography and oral testimonies to implement social change. The second was Practicing Oral History among Refugees and Host Communities. Both are much-cited resources used in projects worldwide. The next volume is on using contemporary oral history to tackle climate change in projects worldwide.
Hoffman’s Crow Glen - The Spiritual Universe of an Irish Village was published in 2020 at Samhain, Irish feast of the ancestors. It uses oral testimony, archives, memoir and magic realism to peel back the layers of Irish history in this microcosmic village. It dives deep into pagan sacred sites, colonisation by British aristocrats, the colonial Famine and emigration, the War of Independence and villagers' elaborate spiritual practices on the body, in the home and in the landscape, as told in their own words. In Hoffman’s moving book Asylum Under Dreaming Spires - Refugees' Lives in Cambridge Today, a dozen refugee life-stories intersect across the spaces between academia, ethnography and public policy, with the city of Cambridge, UK, as a central character. Her illustrated ethnography Savoir-Faire des Anciens, written in French with an 88-year-old hermit shepherd, sold out as soon as it was published.
Hoffman is currently finishing Les Voix de la Forêt ~ Façonner l’Avenir Ensemble dans un Village du Sud Gironde (Voices of the Forest ~ Shaping the Future Together in a South Gironde Village). In French, with a later edition in English, it explores the future of a Bordeaux forest valley described by scientists as a ‘Noah’s Ark’ for protected species. This polyphonic ethnography radically extends Hoffman’s work with voice and orality: the opposing perspectives of local humans - from the hunter to the ecologist - go into dialogue with the voices of their more-than-human animal neighbours. The valley is home to 33 different species of birds, mammals, insects and amphibians that are classified as ‘protected’, ‘rare’ or ‘threatened with extinction’. Across the chapters, all residents consider the environmental and political challenges ahead, and the 33 species of wildlife - each in turn - tell what they need to survive in the valley. The book shows how this community - of 800 humans and about an equal number of individual, rare, threatened wild animals - is a microcosm for the inter-species challenges we face at a planetary level today.
In 2018 Hoffman moved the base for her Big Picture travels, research and writing to a 300-year-old forester’s house in this valley (pictured, right), creating a ReWilding Project and writers' retreat there, inside the largest forest in Western Europe. Click here for a virtual visit...
For an overview of her books (some pictured below left), click here.
Publications from the Big Picture since 2018
Crow Glen - The Spiritual Universe of an Irish Village, published at Samhain 2020, the Irish feast of the ancestors. Crow Glen is Glenville, the isolated village in the Irish mountains where Hoffman grew up before emigrating to work at universities abroad. Read chapters here and here.
In July 2020, Hoffman’s book for Routledge on refugees was re-edited by Taylor Francis as part of their Sustainable Development Goals Collection, to help deliver the United Nations’ development goals.
Her 2019 book with Routledge on using oral testimonies to catalyse positive change both for refugees and for host communities: read an extract
At her office in Cambridge, UK, Hoffman does research and publications for British local authorities several times each year, on the needs of their poorer communities.
The Fleurs Trilogy: a trilogy of literary criticism on the nineteenth-century Paris of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. Originally written during two years as a Visiting Scholar hosted at King's College, University of Cambridge, it’s drawn from Hoffman’s PhD thesis. Second edition, 2020.
Hoffman’s book review of Packy Jim - Folklore and Worldview on the Irish Border (by Ray Cashman, University of Wisconsin Press) for the American Oral History Review, published by Oxford University Press
Dr. Mathew Staunton, a book-making specialist at the Sorbonne University in Paris and editor of Onslaught Press, Oxford, produced a beautiful limited collectors' edition in hardback colour of Hoffman's illustrated book Savoir-Faire des Anciens - Un Village des Corbières Maritimes, Hier et Demain
Publication of Gooseworld, (click on Gooseworld to read the text) - an eco-poem by Hoffman to mark the 10th anniversary of The Goose, A journal of arts, environment and culture in Canada (click here to browse this interesting eco-humanities journal)
Workshops and presentations at American Oral History Association conferences in Canada and the US; at the Dangerous Oral Histories Conference in Belfast; and at the Oral History Society Migrant Group at the University of East London
Hoffman shares the Bordeaux Writers’ Retreat with her husband, medical scientist Dr Richard Hoffman, who has written three books there on public health. His articles for the general public - like ‘Red meat study caused a stir: here’s what wasn’t discussed’ - have over 1.8 million readers online.
For more information, click on Books
