Professor Dorothy Driver

• Biography/ Background

  Dorothy Driver holds a Professorship in the English discipline, and teaches half-time to allow for travel to South Africa for research purposes. From 1981-2001 she taught full-time at the University of Cape Town, where she is now an Emeritus Professor and an Honorary Research Associate. Her particular research interests have been in the constructions and representations of gender and race both under Apartheid and after Apartheid, and in the writings of women. She has published on Olive Schreiner, Pauline Smith, Nadine Gordimer, Njabulo Ndebele, Yvonne Vera, Zoë Wicomb and many others, as well as on a variety of general topics such as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, African political memoirs, Drum magazine, and the African National Congress constitutional guidelines. She was also one of the editors of the historical anthology Women Writing Africa: the Southern Region, for several years co-edited the Southern African Review of Books, and for twenty years produced an annual Survey of the Year’s Work in South African literature in English for the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. She is on the editorial boards of English in Africa (Rhodes University) and the online journal Transnational Literature (Flinders University). As a visiting professor and associate professor she has taught courses in South African literature at University of Chicago and at Stanford University.

• Teaching Interests

  Haunted Histories: South African Writing (2014, 2016)

  Representing Truth & Reconciliation (occasional)

  Modernisms (2010, 2012)

  The Question of Postmodernism (2013) 

  
  ON LEAVE IN 2015

• Publications

  Books

  Women Writing Africa: The Southern Region. Ed. M.J. Daymond, Dorothy Driver, Sheila Meintjes, Leloba Molema, Chiedza Musengezi, Margaret Orford, Nobantu Rasebotsa. New York: Feminist Press / Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2003.

  Nadine Gordimer: A Bibliography. Comp. Dorothy Driver, Craig MacKenzie and John Reid. Intro. Dorothy Driver. Grahamstown: NELM, 1993; Oxford: Hans Zell, 1994.

  The Little Karoo. By Pauline Smith. Cape Town: David Philip, 1990. A new edition, with introduction (i-xix).

  Pauline Smith. Ed. Dorothy Driver. Johannesburg: McGraw-Hill, 1983.

  Selected Journal Articles and Book Chapters (2005-present)
  

  'Olive Schreiner's From Man to Man and "the copy within". Changing the Victorian Subject. Ed. Maggie Tonkin, Mandy Treagus, Madeleine Seys, & Sharon Crozier-De Rosa. Adelaide: U of Adelaide P, 2014. 123-150.

  'Editorial: Re-framing South African Life Narrative.' With Sue Kossew. Life Writing 11.2 (2014): 155-158. published online 2 May 2014.

  'The Fabulous Fifties: Short Fiction in English.' The Cambridge History of South African Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge and David Attwell. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. 387-409.

  'Zoe Wicomb and the Cape Cosmopolitan.' Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 23. 2 (2011): 93-107.

  'The Struggle over the Sign: Writing and History in Zoe Wicomb's Art'. Journal of Southern African Studies 36.3 (2010): 523-542.

  ‘Coastal Scenes in Bessie Head's The Cardinals.' Something Rich and Strange: Sea Changes, Beaches and the Littoral in the Antipodes. Ed. Sue and Rick Hosking. Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2009. 127-145.

  '"On these premises I am the government": Njabulo Ndebele's The Cry of Winnie Mandela and the Reconstructions of Gender and Nation.' Africa Writing Europe: Opposition, Juxtaposition, Entanglement. Ed. Maria Olaussen and Christina Angelfors. Cross/Cultures - Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures in English (CC) vol. 105. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2009. 1-38.

  'History's Intimate Invasions: Yvonne Vera's The Stone Virgins.' With Meg Samuelson. Land, Nation, Self: New Critical Approaches to Zimbabwean and Rhodesian Writing. Special edition of English Studies in Africa 50: 1 (2007).  

  'Gillian Slovo's Red Dust and the Ambiguous Articulations of Gender.' Scrutiny2 12. 2 (2007): 107-122. 

  Writing Women in Post-Apartheid South Africa.' The Face of the Spirit: Illuminating a Century - Essays by South African Women. Ed. Beulah Thumbadoo. Pretoria: Department of Arts and Culture, 2007. 167-169.

  'Unruly Subjects in Southern African Fiction.' Towards a Trans-Cultural Future: Literature and Society in a 'Post'-Colonial World. Ed. Geoffrey V. Davis et al. ASNEL Papers 9.2 Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2005. 61-67.

  'Truth, Reconciliation, Gender: the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Black Women's Intellectual History.' Australian Feminist Studies 20. 47 (2005): 219-229.

• Professional Interests

   Her rmajor research area is in South African literature written in English, with particular interest in the constructions and representations of gender and race both under Apartheid and after Apartheid, and in postcolonial literary theory as it intersects with feminist theory and gender studies. But she has taught, and continues to teach, more widely than this.

Entry last updated: Friday, 16 Jan 2015