Staff

Michael Titlestad is a Personal Professor in the Department of English, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Since 2000, he has published fifty-seven research articles, many in leading journals, and six chapters in books. He is also the author of two monographs: Shipwreck Narratives: Out of our Depth (New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2021) and Making the Changes: Jazz in South African Literature and Reportage (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill Academic Publishers, 2004).

In addition to editing English Studies in Africa for sixteen years, he has co-edited two book collections: The Plague Years: Reflecting on Pandemics (London: Routledge, 2022) and The Ongoing End: On the Limits of Apocalyptic Narrative (London: Routledge Press, 2017). His research interests include maritime literatures, interwar future fictions, South African fiction, and Modernism.

E-mail: michael.titlestad@wits.ac.za

Robert Muponde is professor of Literature in the Discipline of English. Previous positions at the University of the Witwatersrand involved serving as an Assistant Dean of International Affairs and Partnerships in the Faculty of Humanities as well as being a former Wits Director of Postgraduate Affairs. His intellectual and research interests cut across African and Zimbabwean Literatures, Politics and Culture.

His book publications include The Scandalous Times of a Book Louse: A Memoir of a Childhood (Penguin, 2021); Some Kinds of Childhood: Images of History and Resistance in Zimbabwean Literature (Africa World Press: 2015); While the Harvest Rots: Possessing Worlds of Kudzanai Chiurai’s Art (co-edited with Emma Laurence. Goodman Gallery: Johannesburg, 2017); Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature and Culture (co-edited with Ranka Primorac. Weaver Press, 2005); Manning the Nation: Father Figures in Zimbabwean Literature and Society (co-edited with Kizito Muchemwa. Weaver Press & Jacana, 2007); Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera (co-edited with Mandi Taruvinga, Weaver Press & James Currey, 2002); and No More Plastic Balls: New Voices in the Zimbabwean Short Story (co-ed with C. Chihota, College Press, Harare, 2000). The Lost Tales of Papati Papati Hiyayi and “Pakaipa!”: Imagining Imagination at the Dead End of Words/Worlds are his current research/writing projects.

E-mail: robert.muponde@wits.ac.za

Professor Christopher Thurman is Director of the Tsikinya-Chaka Centre and a member of the English Department in the School of Literature, Language and Media at Wits University. He is co-editor, with Sandra Young, of Global Shakespeare and Social Injustice: Towards a Transformative Encounter (2023). He is also the editor of South African Essays on ‘Universal’ Shakespeare (2014), Sport versus Art: A South African Contest (2010) and fifteen volumes of the journal Shakespeare in Southern Africa.

His other books are the monograph Guy Butler: Reassessing a South African Literary Life (2010); Text Bites: An Anthology for High Schools (2009); and two collections of arts journalism, At Large: Reviewing the Arts in South Africa (2012) and Still at Large: Dispatches from South Africa’s Frontiers of Politics and Art (2017). Thurman is president of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa and founder of Shakespeare ZA. He writes a weekly arts column for Business Day.

E-mail: christopher.thurman@wits.ac.za

Gerald Gaylard's subject is the Romance through the ages, those especially imaginative art forms with their roots in nature and animism that challenge mimesis and the market: from Beowulf and neo-Medievalism, to Romanticism, and then on to contemporary Postcolonialism, Speculative Fiction, Fantasy, and Science Fiction.

He teaches and supervises in all of these areas. His publications include After Colonialism: African Postmodernism and Magical Realism (Wits 2006), Marginal Spaces: Reading Ivan Vladislavi? (Wits 2011), and At Home with Ivan Vladislavi?: An African Flaneur Greens the Postcolonial City (Routledge 2023).

E-mail: gerald.gaylard@wits.ac.za

Colette Gordon is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she convenes postgraduate programmes and teaches the postgrad course in Early Modern Studies.  She holds a PhD from the University of London (Queen Mary) and has also lectured at University of Cape Town and Goldsmiths and has taught Shakespeare and London Theatre for Central School of Speech and Drama’s Theatre and the City MA.

She has been a fellow of the Folger Institute and is currently an affiliate of the Tsikinya Chaka Centre. Her work is published in Shakespeare Bulletin, Shakespeare: The Journal of the British Shakespeare Society, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, Cahiers Elizabethans, African Theatre, Shakespeare in Southern Africa, Convergences: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, The South African Medical Journal (SAMJ), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance and The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy.  She holds a Humanities Teaching and Learning Award and is developing a unique expectation-based pedagogy for teaching early modern drama.

E-mail: colette.gordon@wits.ac.za

Sofia Kostelac is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English. Her research interests include the politics of canonicity in postcolonial literature, and she has published several articles on the critical reception of Damon Galgut’s novels. She has also published articles on the representational legacies of modernism in South African writing, as well as on the novels of Yvonne Vera.

She is interested in supervising projects on South African and postcolonial literatures, reception studies, cultures of literary prestige, literary modernism, feminist and queer literary theories, as well as on cognitive and affective approaches to literary analysis.

E-mail: sofia.kostelac@wits.ac.za

Sonia Fanucchi is Lecturer in the English Department at Wits University in Johannesburg. Her research interests are divided between nineteenth century Gothic theatricality and Medieval topics. She has published on Dickens and theatricality and is currently preparing a monograph on the links between anti-theatricality and anti-Catholicism in a selection of Victorian fiction. Sonia has also published on Dante in South Africa, as well as on memory, reading and allegory in Dante’s Commedia.

Sonia is the co-founder of Dantessa (Dante Society of South Africa, 2018), a society dedicated to developing a South African community of young Dante scholars and enthusiasts. Their first book, A South African Convivio with Dante: Born Frees’ Interpretations of the Commedia, was published by Firenze University Press in 2021.

E-mail: sonia.fanucchi@wits.ac.za

Karl van Wyk is Lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He began teaching in the English Department at the beginning of 2021. His research and publication interests include postmodern historiography and modern South African writing. He is particularly concerned with South Africa's attitudes to, and representations of, apartheid history.

E-mail: karl.vanwyk@wits.ac.za

Esthie Hugo is Associate Lecturer in English Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Her research interests include world-literature, genre studies, the environmental humanities, critical race theory, and materialist feminism. Esthie has published on contemporary Gothic fiction, Caribbean women’s poetry, food, and feminism, as well as atmospheric pollution and racial violence in postcolonial African writing.

She is currently working on her first academic monograph, provisionally entitled Intimate Invasions: Literature, Ecology and the New Feminist Gothic. 

E-mail: esthie.hugo@wits.ac.za