Sarah took up the Directorship of WiSER in January 2013, but she is no stranger to the Institute having been a prominent Senior Researcher here from 2000 until 2010. Born in South Africa and educated at the Universities of (then) Natal and Cape Town, Sarah won a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship to read for a D.Phil. at Oxford. A literary scholar by training, Sarah’s varied research interests and prolific publication record have established her as a leading cultural commentator and critic as well as one of the leading scholars of her generation. She has lectured at the University of Stellenbosch and, for the past five years, has been a Visiting Professor at Yale University and Duke University. Sarah has edited several path-breaking books; her influential monograph, Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-apartheid, explores mutuality, transgression and embodiment in contemporary South Africa.
Sarah has published in various journals including in Cultural Studies, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Journal of South African Studies, Public Culture, Third Text and Social Dynamics. She is a member of the editorial boards of Journal of Southern African Studies, Humanity, Cultural Studies, Social Dynamics, English Studies in Africa, and English Academy Review.
Her books include:
Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-apartheid (Wits University Press, 2009)
Load Shedding: Writing on and Over the Edge of South Africa (Jonathan Ball, 2009)
Johannesburg – The Elusive Metropolis (Duke University Press, 2008)
Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diasporic Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2007)
Sense of Culture: South African Cultural Studies (Oxford University Press, 2000)
Negotiating the Past: The Making of memory in South Africa (Oxford University Press, 1998)
Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia (Routledge, 1996)