Time: 5:00pmVenue: ArtsOne Lecture Theatre, QMUL
The Lecture will be followed by a Reception.
For further details on Professor Barnard’s visit, contact: Dr Andrew van der Vlies, a.vandervlies@qmul.ac.uk.
Rita Barnard (PhD. Duke) is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, and a Professor Extraordinaire at the University of Stellenbosch. She is currently Director of Comparative Literature at UPenn, where she has also served as Director of the Alice Paul Center for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality.
One of the most eminent—and most widely cited— scholars of South African literature, Professor Barnard's scholarship, especially her monograph Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place (Oxford, 2007), contributions to leading edited collections, and numerous essays on South African fiction, drama, prose non-fiction, cultural studies, and literary historiography, in leading peer-reviewed journals, are a staple of university courses on South African writing and on postcolonial and world literatures.
Since the publication of her first monograph, The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance: Kenneth Fearing, Nathanael West and Mass Culture in the 1930s (Cambridge, 1995), Professor Barnard has also been a leading scholar of American and global modernisms. She has served on the advisory boards of leading journals including PMLA, Contemporary Literature, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and Research in African Literatures, and currently co-edits Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies. Her most recent publication is The Cambridge Companion to Nelson Mandela (2014), which she edited and introduced.
