Elites, and ecologies

Marella Hoffman has worked from Cambridge, England, since the early 1990s, first at the University of Cambridge, then also at the city's political institutions. She had been raised in a multi-generational, working-class household in remote, indigenous rural Ireland, very far from academia and elites. Her PhD thesis, published as a bilingual trilogy, was on the high culture of Paris in the nineteenth-century. Her post-doctoral research included trainings in anthropology, and completing a six-year traditional psychoanalysis with a Fellow of the University of Cambridge. Within the ‘thinking space’ of a research fellowship at Cambridge, Hoffman made the change from working on culture to working in social and political science, first as an academic, then with government agencies on policy.
Now a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, her work has long listened to poorer, de-centralised and marginal communities - from remote Irish villagers to French mountain shepherds, from the unemployed underclass hidden away in Cambridge, to the multiple species in a forest ecology. Whether in urban or in rural settings, her ethnographies and policy work - including more recently with communities of non-human animals - show that they have at least as much to teach us about the needs of the world as elites do, especially in terms of solutions for the global crises we face today. Since Hoffman moved her writer’s retreat to a forest reserve, her work increasingly gives voice to nature and wildlife species as being now the most marginalised, discriminated community of all...

Major research awards

IMG_0477.jpg

  • Year-long funding award from the French government, for work on poetry

  • Year-long funding from the Swiss government, for work on the culture of the city

  • Two-year funding award from the National University of Ireland, for international cultural studies

  • Two-year funding award from the British government, for building democratic participation in grassroots communities

Academic research fellowships at...

King’s College, University of Cambridge; University of Notre Dame, USA; University of Paris; University of Geneva; University of Nice; University College Dublin; National University of Ireland

Guest lectures at...

Various colleges at University of Cambridge; Boston College, USA; London Metropolitan University; University of East Anglia; University of Hertfordshire; University College Cork; British Royal Literary & Scientific Institution; British Government Homes & Communities Department; British Chartered Institute of Housing

Ongoing public policy work

Hoffman keeps an office in Cambridge, UK. After many years of international work on public policy, she continues to do regular work for British local authorities on the grassroots needs of their poorer communities.