Dorothée joined the University of Oxford in 2018 as a departmental Lecturer for the Portuguese sub-faculty, focusing on African Literatures in Portuguese.
She is curerntly a Career Development Fellowship in Women’s, Gender and Sexualities Studies in the Humanities division. As such, her academic responsibilities lie mostly with the MSt in Women’s, Gender and Sexualities Studies, where Dorothée teaches the core module Feminist Approaches to Research, with Prof. Sneha Krishnan, as well as two option classes: Natural Women? Gender and the Environment and Crossing Fiction and Theory: African women writers and African feminism in conversation. She is also a Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College.
Dorothée’s research interests lie at the intersection of African literatures, histories and cosmologies, highlighting how Western methodologies and academic disciplines fail to grasp the complexity of African fiction as an intellectual and political intervention. Dorothée’s research encompasses a wide range of African fiction, mostly in Portuguese, as well as French and English, with a particular interest in gender and feminism, environmental and ecocritical perspectives, and all things Angola-related.
Based on her doctoral dissertation, her first book, Fiction as History: Resistance and Complicities in Angolan Postcolonial Literature (Legenda, 2022) examines Angolan novels as historical sources. It argues that Angolan writers’ specific standpoint as members of the nationalist elite make their literary contribution privileged sources to investigate power structures in postcolonial Angola. On the other hand, it also shows how this very proximity led to certain blindspots in fictional accounts of Angola’s history, like the systematic centring of male voices, experiences and perspectives as well as an ambivalent relation to the postcolonial regime. This book has been translated in Portuguese, thanks to the generous support of Jesus College, and has been published in Portugal by Mercado de Letras. It is also available for free on Africae’s website, an open-access publisher specialising in African Studies
In 2020, she was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship with Oxford’s Faculty of Modern Languages, as well as a Junior Research Fellowship at Jesus College, for her project ‘Contemporary Griots: Writing the Revolution in Contemporary Africa’, which proposes to use the West African figure of the griot as a conceptual device to look comparatively at the postcolonial literature of Zimbabwe, Angola, Algeria and the Congo (Brazzaville), examining the literary legacies of revolution and internal conflict in postcolonial Africa. During that time, she published, with Susanne Gehrmann, the first edited collection in French on African queer arts and activism : Esthétiques et activismes queer dans les arts et littératures africaines (Karthala, 2024).
More recently, pressed by the acceleration of global warming and multiple environmental crises, Dorothée has developed a sustained interest in ecocritical perspectives and non-human agency in African and Lusophone Literatures, revising the Luso-African literary canon through an ecocritical lens. She investigates how fiction, through the centring of alternative cosmologies and epistemologies, can celebrate and inspire more sustainable and respectful relations to the Earth and the living.
Dorothée is on the editorial board of the journals Lusotopie and Sources: Materials and Feildwork in African Studies, and of the book series “Edinburgh Critical Studies in South-South Literary Engagements” (Edinburgh University Press), edited by Elleke Boehmer.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Monograph
• A ficção como história. Africae / Mercado de Letras / Universidade Católica de Angola, 2025. Portuguese translation (by Susanna Fereira) of my monograph Fiction as History, in paperback and available open access: https://books.openedition.org/africae/2670
Edited collections and special issues
• Empires : la fabrique de la « question métisse », et ses avatars contemporains, edited with Françoise Blum, Maria-Benedita Basto, and Martin Mourre, under contract with Karthala, forthcoming March 2026.
• Luso-Ecologies: Ecocritical Perspectives on Lusophone Arts and Literatures, special issue of Portuguese Studies, 41 (1), edited with Andrzej Stuart-Thompson, 2025.
• Esthétiques et activismes queer dans les arts et littératures africaines, edited with Susanne Gehrmann, Paris : Karthala, 2024.
• Angola in the 21st century: Collective Imagination and Knowledge production, special issue of Lusotopie, edited with António Tomás, XXII (2), 2023.
Book chapters / peer-reviewed articles
• ‘“Exorbitant freedom”- Dambudzo Marechera in Oxford (1974-1976),’ in Race, Belonging and Resistance in Oxford ed. by Stephen Tuck, Patricia Daley et al. (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2026).
• ‘‘Entre Judeus’ : Entre héritage colonial, incarnation national(ist)e et figure victimaire, la figure métisse dans la littérature Angolaise,’ in Empires : la fabrique de la « question métisse », ed. by Françoise Blum et al. (Karthala, forthcoming 2026).
• ‘Bourgeois Pigs, Magical Goats and Vagabond Dogs: reading Angolan fiction dis-anthropocentrically’, Portuguese Studies 41 (1), 2025.
• ‘Decentring the Human in Lusophone Studies’, with Andrzej Stuart-Thompson, introduction to the special issue Luso-Ecologies: Ecocritical Perspectives on Lusophone Arts and Literatures for Portuguese Studies 41 (1), 2025.
• ‘Revolutionary Languages in Angolan Boyhood Narratives: Literary Filiations from Luandino Vieira to Ondjaki’, with Andrzej Stuart-Thompson, in Global Portuguese: Literary, Historical, Sociolinguistic and Anthropological Approaches ed. by Shihan Da Silva and Stefan Halikowski-Smith (Brill, 2025).
• ‘Queeriser les études littéraires africaines: contextes, méthode, combats’, With Susanne Gehrmann, introduction to our edited book Arts et activismes afroqueers (2024).
• ‘“This one here is not me” – Decolonizing Female Subjectivities in Paulina Chiziane’s Niketche’ in Experimental Subjectivities in Global Black Women’s Writing, ed. by Jean Wyatt and Sheldon George (Bloomsbury, 2024).