What work does literature do in the world? What happens to books when they travel? Can books change the world? How do stories make us human?
These questions have driven Professor Isabel Hofmeyr’s distinguished research career. Her work has been concerned with African literature and its global role and she has established herself as a leading scholar of world literature. Over the last decade, she has turned her attention to the Indian Ocean world, a strategic arena in which Africa’s futures will be shaped.
After completing her bachelor’s degree in journalism at Rhodes University, honours in English literature and master’s in South African literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, she completed a second MA, this time in African studies, at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. She later returned to Wits for a PhD degree in African studies.
She spent a year at the University of Durban-Westville as a junior lecturer before moving to the SA Committee on Higher Education as an adult educator and then to Wits where she went on to become professor of African literature, a position she currently holds together with that of visiting global distinguished professor at New York University. From 2005 to 2007 she played a leading role in helping to establish the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at Wits.
Her research on the Indian Ocean world maps the region as a literary and cultural arena. From this research she completed a monograph Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading, which tells the story of the Mahatma’s newspaper established during his South African years (1893-1914) and how this formed his political philosophy. Uday Mehta, a prominent Gandhi scholar, praised the book: “Very few books on Gandhi capture the minutiae and horizons of his world with such riveting intelligence”.
Her earlier work includes We Spend our Years as a Tale that is Told: Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom, which was shortlisted for the Herskovits Prize in 1994, and The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (2004), which won the 2007 Richard L. Greaves Award, and has become an influential text in debates on world literature.
Actively involved in postgraduate life, she has supervised 22 PhD students, 25 MA students and oversees a number of honours research projects each year. Hofmeyr has authored/co-authored 23 peer-reviewed articles, 12 book chapters, one monograph, and four edited collections in the last eight years. Her articles have appeared in prominent international journals such as PMLA, Public Culture and Journal of African History. She has served on the editorial board of numerous journals, including Modern Asian Studies, edited more than two dozen special issues of journals which profile emerging zones of research, and was recently invited to be co-editor of the Cambridge History of the Indian Ocean. She regularly lectures and delivers keynote addresses in a range of local and international forums.