Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures
presents a workshop with
Professor Isabel Hofmeyr (NYU and Witswatersrand)
on
Indian Ocean Worlds
Program
12.00-1.00pm: Lunch
1.00-1.15pm: Introduction
1.15-1.45pm: Isabel Hofmeyr on "Indian Ocean Worlds"
1.45-2.00pm: Fahad Bishara (respondent)
2.00-2.15pm: Maya Boutaghou (respondent)
2.15-3.30pm: Discussion and Q & A
Bio: Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor of African Literature and Indian Ocean Cultures at the University of the Witswatersand. Her research interests include postcolonialism; African literature; Southern African literary studies; oral history and literature; John Bunyan; seventeenth century studies; textual transnationalism; Africa-India interactions; Indian Ocean studies; histories of the book and print culture; and histories of reading and writing. Her current work focuses on Africa and its intellectual trajectories in the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Her earlier scholarship examined ways of historicising oral literature and its interactions with literacy. As South Africa’s transition opened the country up to democracy and globalisation, Hofmeyr turned her attention to themes of transnationalism and textual circulation. More recently she has explored textual circulation in the Global South with a focus on the Indian Ocean. Her work addresses questions of Africa’s intellectual place in the world and the material and aesthetic history of texts and their transnational circulation. She is the author of Gandhi's Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (Harvard, 2013), The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim's Progress (Princeton, 2004), We Spend Our Years As a Tale that is Told: Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom (Heinemann, 1994).