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, applied and international. They include a trilogy commissioned by Routledge on public policy, refugees and climate change, respectively.
After many years as an academic at the University of Cambridge, UK, Hoffman retains an office and some work in Cambridge, but has also lectured or held research awards at universities in France, Switzerland, Ireland and the US, and has worked extensively for government. Her work has won major financial awards from governments and universities. A Fellow of Britain's Royal Anthropological Institute, Hoffman’s transdisciplinary methods - streamlining culture, political science and anthropology - build bridges between academia and public policy. Her use of contemporary oral histories to create policy solutions has been taught as best practice by government agencies. Raised in indigenous rural Ireland, Hoffman works multilingually, publishing in English and in French, but also includes Irish Gaelic and French Occitan as decolonising indigenous languages in her books.
Recent work
A windsurfer and lifelong Buddhist meditator, Hoffman deeply values rurality (though four of her books study life in cities). She moved her research and writing base from Cambridge city, UK, to a rewilded natural environment in southern France. Her resulting work has been prolific, bringing communities into dialogue with the more-than-human voices of nature. The forthcoming Voices of the Forest ~ Shaping the future together in a village of south west France (coming out first in French as Les Voix de la Forêt ~ Façonner l’Avenir Ensemble dans un Village du Sud Gironde) explores the future of a forest valley that is described by scientists as a ‘Noah’s Ark’ for protected species.
This polyphonic ethnography radically extends Hoffman’s work with 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 wildlife that are classified as ‘protected’, ‘rare’ or ‘threatened with extinction’. Across the chapters, all residents consider the environmental and political challenges ahead, and the wildlife species 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, wild animals - is a microcosm for the inter-species challenges we face at a planetary level today. See here for an interesting extract in English.
The first in Hoffman’s trilogy of books for Routledge - 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 third volume, already underway, will be on using contemporary oral history to tackle climate change in projects worldwide. It will bring into applied, practical dialogue the diverse forms of intelligence that are needed to tackle climate change around the world - from science, artificial intelligence and democratic politics, to indigenous lifeways, cross-species collaboration and the psychology of the collective unconscious.
Hoffman’s Crow Glen - The Spiritual Universe of an Irish Village was published in 2020 at Samhain, the Irish feast of the ancestors. It blends oral testimony, archives, memoir and magic realism to peel back the layers of Irish history in Hoffman’s remote native village. The book dives deep into the village’s pagan sacred sites, colonisation by British aristocrats, colonial Famine and forced emigration, and War of Independence. Entwined around these are the 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 moved the base for her Big Picture research and writing from Cambridge city, UK, to a 300-year-old forester’s house in southern France (pictured). With her biologist husband, Dr. Richard Hoffman, she created a ReWilding Project there, inside the largest forest in Western Europe. Click here for a virtual visit...
For an overview of all her books (some pictured below), click here.
To contact Marella Hoffman, email contact@marellahoffman.com or Marella.Hoffman@cambridge.gov.uk
Some publications in recent years
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 a two-year post as a Visiting Scholar 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
