Elites and the dust

Marella Hoffman worked from Cambridge, England since the early 1990s, first at the University of Cambridge and then at the city's political institutions. Her PhD thesis, later published as a trilogy, was on the high culture of Paris in the nineteenth-century. But during a two-year fellowship as a Member of High Table at the University of Cambridge, she moved over to work in social and political science, first as an academic and then with government agencies on policy. Now a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, her work keeps a footing in poorer communities - in the dust and graffiti - among those Frantz Fanon called The Wretched of the Earth.  From Parisian poet Baudelaire to Irish villagers, French shepherds to the unemployed underclass hidden away in Cambridge, her books reveal them to be dirt-poor, time-rich deep thinkers. Both in urban and rural settings, her ethnographies and policy work with poor and marginalised communities - and with non-human animal communities - show that they have at least as much to teach us about the world as elites do, especially in terms of solutions for the crises we face today. Since moving her writer’s retreat to a forest nature reserve in 2018, Hoffman’s work increasingly gives voice to wildlife species as being now the most marginalised community of all...

Major research awards

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  • 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 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...

Cambridge University's Institute of Continuing Education; Boston College University, 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 has an office in Cambridge, UK, doing research and publications several times a year for British local authorities on the needs of their poorer communities.