School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies

Profile

Katie is a doctoral candidate at the University of Sussex. She joined the teaching team in the Department of English at Portsmouth in Spring/Summer, 2011.

Katie’s research explores the place of the African writer in the global literary marketplace, focusing on anglophone South African texts in the context of other African literatures published in the West. She is currently investigating the possibilities for resistance to what have widely become known as universalising global forces in literary texts. This work includes attention to the ways in which small press, avant-garde periodicals – the ‘little magazine’ or protest magazine – precipitated the rise of the Artist’s Book in South Africa, employing an experimental visual-textual form that escaped the restrictions and demands of the censor. 

Katie also has broad interests in the epistolary, letters and the picture postcard, and the politics of the archive.

She also teaches at the University of Sussex.

Publications

'Migratory shape-shifting in African Literary Criticism', Africa, (Spring, 2012).

Forthcoming – Review: Communicating in the Third Space, edited by Karin Ikas and Gerhard Wagner (Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2009). Textual Practice.

Conference Papers

'Destinal failure and the archive: letter forms and narrative in Zoe Wicomb and Ivan Vladislavic'. ‘Under Construction: Gateways and Walls’: EACLALS Triennial Conference, Istanbul (April, 2011).

''Posting' Apartheid South Africa', Picture this: postcards and letters beyond text. University of Sussex, UK (March, 2011).

'Amos Tutuola: The Palm-Wine Drinkard and the literary marketplace'. IAS Summer School, Theory for a Global Age: The Place of Africa?, University of Warwick, UK (July, 2010).

‘“As it will profit for both of us”: corrective Tutuola and the publication of The Palm-Wine Drinkard’. School of English DPhil Colloquium, University of Sussex, UK (June 2010).

Co-organiser Picture this: postcards and letters beyond text, March 25-26, 2011.

Co-organiser of the interdisciplinary conference, exhibition and mixed-media Postcards Competition. The conference and its related events explored the epistolary and its various effects on narratives of all kinds, in fiction, visual art, social history, through both critical and creative practice. 'Picture this' had reciprocal links to Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, the Brighton Illustrators Group, and the publishers Myriad Editions.

Our web resource has further details for those interested in postcards and letters: http://www.postcards-letters.org.uk/index.php/picturethis/pt