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 between academia, communities and public policy decisions. She was for over a decade chief editor of a public policy magazine in Cambridge, communicating policy to poorer communities in 40,000 copies per year. Her projects boosting civic participation in poor and ethnic communities have been taught as best practice models by government agencies.
A Nature-lover and windsurfer immersed in wind and water, Hoffman moved her writing base to a rewilded environment in 2018. Her resulting work brings communities into dialogue with the more-than-human natural world around them.
Crow Glen - The Spiritual Universe of an Irish Village was published at Samhain 2020, the Irish feast of the ancestors and of All Souls. The book uses ethnography, archival documents, memoir and magic realism to tell the layers of Irish history in this microcosmic village. It delves into pagan sacred sites, colonisation by British aristocrats, the Famine, emigration, the War of Independence and villagers' elaborate Catholic practices on the body, in the home and in the landscape, as told in their own words. In her moving book Asylum Under Dreaming Spires - Refugees' Lives in Cambridge Today, a dozen extraordinary life-stories intersect across the spaces between academia, ethnography and public policy, with the city of Cambridge as a central character. Hoffman’s illustrated ethnographic book Savoir-Faire des Anciens, written in French with an 88-year-old hermit shepherd, sold out as soon as it was published. Her book for publishers Routledge - Practicing Oral History to Improve Public Policies and Programs - teaches how to use ethnography and oral testimonies to implement social change. And Routledge also went on to publish her book, Practicing Oral History among Refugees and Host Communities.
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), out in 2025. In French, with a subsequent edition in English, it explores the future prospects of a Bordeaux valley described by scientists as a ‘Noah’s Ark’ for protected species. This polyphonic ethnography radically extends Hoffman’s work with voice and orality: this time, the opposing perspectives of village inhabitants - from the hunter to the ecologist - go into dialogue with the voices of their more-than-human animal neighbours. This famous 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 together the environmental and political challenges ahead, and the 33 species, 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 wild animals - are a microcosm for the challenges we face at a planetary level today.
In 2018 Hoffman moved the base for her Big Picture work to a setting immersed in Nature, creating a beautiful Writers' Retreat (pictured) in a Nature reserve in the ‘Noah’s Ark’ valley described above, in 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 and of All Souls. Crow Glen is Glenville, the North Cork village where Hoffman grew up before emigrating to work at universities abroad. Read preview 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, created 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 talks 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 1.7 million readers online.
For more information, click on Books
