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UCT RESEARCH REPORT 2012
Department of English
Language and Literature
Research report 2012
(Including the Centre for Creative Writing)
Head of Department: Associate Professor
Carrol Clarkson
Departmental Profile
Members of the department are engaged in research over
a wide area, ranging from the literature of the European
Renaissance to that of contemporary South Africa. Genres
covered include drama, poetry and prose, travel writing,
and autobiography. Some of the finest writers in the country
teach creative writing at undergraduate and graduate level.
Departmental Statistics
Permanent and long-term contract staff
Professors Emeriti
5
Honorary Professor
1
Professors
2
Associate Professors
4.5
Senior Lecturers
2
Lecturers
5
Administrative and Clerical Staff
3
Total
22.50
Students
Doctoral
17
Master’s
15
Honours
101
Undergraduate
2110
Total
2303
Research Fields and Staff
Dr Peter Anderson
Poetry, romanticism to modernism, history and literature,
19th-century Cape literature, culture and society, especially
the eastern frontier.
Dr Mary Bock (Honorary Research Associate)
Analysis of verbal and non-verbal aspects of discourse,
critical discourse analysis, narrative analysis with particular
reference to the language and structure of testimonies
from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Dr Mbongiseni Buthelezi
Teaching and research interests: Oral poetry, oral
storytelling, imperialism and colonialism, historical fiction,
Africa and the diaspora.
Associate Professor Carrol Clarkson (Head of
Department)
Post-apartheid South African fiction, literary theory,
especially deconstruction and language philosophy as it
relates to jurisprudence and contemporary South African
fine art.
Emeritus Professor J.M. Coetzee
A novelist, essayist, linguist, translator
Dr Victoria Collis-Buthelezi
African and African Diasporic Literature with particular
interest in African-American Literature, Anglophone,
Hispanophone and Francophone literatures of the
Caribbean, and the nineteenth-century.
Associate Professor Imraan Coovadia
(Director: Centre for Creative Writing)
Eighteenth- and nineteenth century English and American
literature, and contemporary fiction.
Emeritus Professor Dorothy Driver (Honorary
Research Associate)
Topics/authors in South African literature and colonial
literature; the construction/deconstruction of the ‘feminine’
subject in language and literature.
Associate Professor Rodney S. Edgecombe
Shakespeare; Herbert; Marvell; Pope; the age of sensibility;
Keats; Dickens; selected contemporary novelists and poets.
Emeritus Professor Gail Fincham
Modernism, particularly Joseph Conrad; postmodern
fiction; narrative theory; postcolonial fiction and theory.
Emeritus Professor Geoffrey Haresnape
(Honorary Research Associate)
Shakespearean poetry and drama; topics/authors in
South African literature in English; topics/authors in early
20th-century English poetry; certain other topics/authors
by consultation.
Dr Derrick Higginbotham
Late Medieval and Early Modern English Theater, Literary
History, Genres, and Cultural Change, Shakespeare and his
contemporaries, Queer Theory/LGBT Studies
Feminist Theory, Marxism, Materialism, and the New
Economic Criticism
Professor John Higgins
Literature and society in the 18th century; literature and
society in the 20th century; theories of representation;
psychoanalysis and cinema; Raymond Williams.