MPhil Western Cape, PhD Maryland
Office: Room 122, AC Jordan Building
Biography
Barbara Boswell is a Professor of English Literary Studies and novelist. She holds a PhD in Women’s Studies from the University of Maryland, and an MPhil degree in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of the Western Cape. Her areas of teaching and research expertise include African women’s writing, Black Diasporic feminist writing, queer theory and literatures, and postcolonial studies. She has guest edited a number of journals and has published widely in academic journals and edited collections in these areas.
Barbara is the author of The Comrade’s Wife (2024), winner of the 2025 University of Johannesburg Main Creative Writing Prize, (jointly with Shubnum Khan) winner of the National Arts and Culture Award (NACA) for 2025, and winner of the 2025 SALA Award for best novel in English. Her first work of fiction, Grace: A Novel (2017) won the University of Johannesburg’s Debut Creative Writing Prize for 2018, and is published in North America as Unmaking Grace. Her scholarly books include the monograph And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women’s Novels as Feminism (2020), which received UCT’s Meritorious Book Award in 2023, and Lauretta Ngcobo: Writing as the Practice of Freedom (2022), which Barbara edited.
A former Fulbright and ACLS Fellow, Barbara has taught at the Universities of Virginia, Maryland and Witwatersrand before joining UCT. In 2024, she spent time as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Life Writing. Barbara is a member of the board of Agenda feminist journal and a board member of Imbiza Journal.
Research Interests
Postcolonial African literature
Feminism and Postcoloniality
Queer Theory
Black Feminist Thought
Intersectional Feminist Theory
Recent publications
2025. “What it Feels Like to Take Flight: My Grandmother as Black Flaneuse and Writing Muse”, under review with Life Writing Journal. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14484528.2025.2593633
2025. “Anything but Fiction: Black South African Women’s Novels as Theory in And Wrote My Story Anyway (2020)” (with Gogontle Mosiakgabo and Aika Swai) in Conversational Bridges: Building African Feminist Communities edited by Polo B. Moji; Kharnita Mohamed; and Aika Swai (HSRC Press
2022: “Black Feminist Geography in South African Literature,” in Spatial Justice, The Nomos of Apartheid. Edited by Jaco Barnard Naude and Julia Chryssostalis. (Routledge).
2021: “Black Radical Feminisms in South African Student Movements: Echoes of Miriam Tlali’s Radical Black Feminist Praxis” in Surfacing: On being black and feminist in South Africa, edited by Gabeba Baderoon and Desiree Lewis (Wits University Press).
2020. Race, Science, and Gender: Producing the Black Woman’s Body as the Deviant, Degenerate ‘Other’” in Fault Lines: A Primer on Race, Science and Society, edited by Jonathan Jansen and Cyrill Walters. (African Sun Media).
2019. Reclaiming Sex and Queering the Word: Black South African Women’s Poetry on Sexuality” in Our Words, Our Worlds: Writing on Black South African Women Poets, 2000- 2019 , edited by Makhosazana Xaba. (UKZN Press)
2017. With Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi. "And She Didn’t Die: Celebrating Lauretta Ngcobo’s Life and Literary Legacy (1931–2015)." scrutiny2 (2017): 1-5.
2017. With Sandy Ndelu and Simamkele Dlakavu. "Womxn's and nonbinary activists’ contribution to the RhodesMustFall and FeesMustFall student movements: 2015 and 2016." (2017): 1-4.
2017. Boswell, Barbara. "Overcoming the ‘daily bludgeoning by apartheid’: black South African women writers, agency, and space." African Identities: 1-14.
2016. "Rewriting apartheid South Africa: race and space in Miriam Tlali and Lauretta Ngcobo’s novels." Gender, Place & Culture 23.9: 1329-1342.
Race, Science, and Gender: Producing the Black Woman’s Body as the Deviant, Degenerate ‘Other’” in Fault Lines: A Primer on Race, Science and Society, edited by Jonathan Jansen and Cyrill Walters. (African Sun Media, 2020).
Reclaiming Sex and Queering the Word: Black South African Women’s Poetry on Sexuality” in Our Words, Our Worlds: Writing on Black South African Women Poets, 2000- 2019 , edited by Makhosazana Xaba. (UKZN Press, 2019)
With Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi. "And She Didn’t Die: Celebrating Lauretta Ngcobo’s Life and Literary Legacy (1931–2015)." scrutiny2 (2017): 1-5.
With Sandy Ndelu and Simamkele Dlakavu. "Womxn's and nonbinary activists’ contribution to the RhodesMustFall and FeesMustFall student movements: 2015 and 2016." (2017): 1-4.
Boswell, Barbara. "Overcoming the ‘daily bludgeoning by apartheid’: black South African women writers, agency, and space." African Identities (2017): 1-14.
"Rewriting apartheid South Africa: race and space in Miriam Tlali and Lauretta Ngcobo’s novels." Gender, Place & Culture 23.9 (2016): 1329-1342.
"On Miniskirts and Hegemonic Masculinity." in Contested Intimacies: Sexuality, Gender and Law in Africa. Edited by Victoria Collis-Buthelezi and Derrick Higginbotham. Siber Ink Press (2015): 46-65.
"Black revolutionary masculinity in Miriam Tlali's Amandla: Lessons for contemporary South Africa." Agenda 27.1 (2013): 32-39.