Dr Andrew van der Vlies, BA MA (Rhodes) MPhil DPhil (Oxford)
Senior Lecturer
email: a.vandervlies@qmul.ac.ukPhone: 020 7882 2688
Research interests:
• South African literatures, cultural studies, and contemporary art
• postcolonial print and text studies, book history, literature and globalization
• postcolonial queer studies
• contemporary world literatures in English
• literature and the archive
Andrew’s first book, South African Textual Cultures: White, Black, Read All Over, published by Manchester University Press in late 2007 (paperback 2011), considers the construction of the idea of an anglophone ‘South African’ literature through a series of case studies of the publication and reception histories of authors from Olive Schreiner, Alan Paton, and Alex La Guma to J.M. Coetzee and Zakes Mda. Laura Chrisman has called it ‘a pathbreaking book’, ‘interdisciplinary research [that] establishes van der Vlies as a first rate literary critic, historian and cultural sociologist' (SHARP News 18.4 [August 2009]: 19). The Journal of Southern African Studies described it as 'a significant addition to the field of postcolonial studies.... informative and enabling', 'a model of scholarly rigour [that] will, one hopes, beget similar projects in other postcolonial contexts' (35.2 [June 2009], 525-26). Andrew continues to write about South African print cultures and publishing history, and his edited reader of significant scholarship in this field is to be published by Wits University Press in 2012. His work on South African writers from Nadine Gordimer to Zoë Wicomb has appeared in a number of scholarly journals and collections, and a short book on Coetzee’s 1999 novel Disgrace was published by Continuum in April 2010. Forthcoming work includes contributions to the Cambridge History of South African Literature, the Oxford History of the Novel in English, and an MLA essay collection on Coetzee, as well as essays on queer politics and performance in contemporary South African art and on the idea of the archive in post-apartheid literature.
Professional activities:
Andrew acted as an Associate Editor for the Oxford Companion to the Book (2010) project. He is co-editor of Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, a Routledge journal, along with Rita Barnard (University of Pennsylvania), and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Southern African Studies and Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa. He guest co-edited (with Patrick Denman Flanery) an issue of Scrutiny2 (13.1) on ‘South African Cultural Texts and the Global Mediascape’ in 2008, and (with Kai Easton) a special double issue of Safundi (12.3-4) on cosmopolitanism and the Cape in the work of Zoë Wicomb in 2011. Formerly lecturer at the University of Sheffield (from February 2005), Andrew joined the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary in January 2010.
Publications:
Books:
2007. South African Textual Cultures: White, Black, Read All Over. Manchester: Manchester University Press. (Paperback March 2011.) For more information, see here and here
2010. J.M.Coetzee's Disgrace. London & New York: Continuum. See more information here.
(ed.) Print, Text & Book Cultures in South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. (Forthcoming.)
Selected recent essays and chapters:
2011. ‘Zoë Wicomb's Queer Cosmopolitanisms’. Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 12:3-4, 425-444.
2010. ‘July's People in Context: Apartheid’s dystopias abroad’. In Nadine Gordimer's July's People. Ed. Brendon Nicholls. London: Routledge. 115-30.
2010. ‘The Archive, the Spectral, and Narrative Responsibility in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light (2006)’. Journal of Southern African Studies 36:3, 583-98.
2010. ‘The History of the Book in Sub-Saharan Africa’. In The Oxford Companion to the Book. Gen. eds. Henry Woudhuysen and Michael Suarez. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 313-20.
2008. ‘An Interview with Jeremy Cronin, Conducted by Andrew van der Vlies’. With introduction. Contemporary Literature 49:4, 514-39.
2008. ‘Annexing the Global, Globalizing the Local’. With Patrick Denman Flanery. Introduction to special issue of Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa 13:1, 3-17.
2008. ‘Outside the Nation(al): “South African” print and book cultures, and global “text-scapes”’. In Books Without Borders. 2 vols. Ed. Mary Hammond and Robert Fraser. Vol. 1: The Cross-National Dimension in Print Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave. 173-85.
2007. ‘Reading Banned Books: Apartheid Censors and Anti-Apartheid Aesthetics’. Wasafiri 22:3, 55-61.
2007. ‘Transnational Print Cultures: Books, -scapes, and the textual Atlantic’. Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 8:1, 45-55.
2006. ‘“Local” Writing, “Global” Reading, and the Demands of the “Canon”: the case of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country’. South African Historical Journal 55, 20-32.
Media:
Andrew is a regular reviewer of African and South African material for the Times Literary Supplement, where he has published on Nadine Gordimer (3 December 2010), Chinua Achebe (2 April 2010), Wole Soyinka (17 August 2007), Ngugi wa Thiong'o (20 October 2006), and J.M. Coetzee (2 September 2005), amongst many others. He has also published in the leading South African fine arts journal Art South Africa and in the British Independent newspaper, and appeared on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Open Book’.