Sarah Nuttall
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Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at WISER at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa. For a decade, from 2013-2023 she Directed the Institute, where she built a strong emphasis on interdisciplinary scholarship, collaborative research and publication in the African humanities, critical public humanities practice in and for the global South and sustained intellectual community for post-graduate students, writers in residence and visitors from elsewhere in Africa and around the world. The Institute is widely recognized for its now twenty-five years of excellent scholarship, generating cutting edge work on hydrocolonialism, necropolitics, the politics of entanglement, biometric capitalism, African aesthetics, the locations of African critical thought and African intellectual history, Johannesburg as an elusive metropolis and much more. Sarah has published fifteen books to date, many of them collaborative, including most recently Your History With Me: The Films of Penny Siopis, with Duke University Press and Reading for Water: Materiality and Method, with Routledge. She is currently at work finishing a book of essays on her work on literature, art and politics as well as a book On Pluviality, a study of rain worlds and elemental reading in southern African literature.
Since 2023, in addition to her curation of many other public programmes, Sarah has convened, with her colleague at WISER Isabel Hofmeyr, three widely subscribed online research forums - Heated Conversations, which considered both a heating planet and overheated pedagogies, Breathing In: Air and Atmospheres, exploring the growing non-transparency of air and the importance of making air explicative, and, most recently, Plant Lives, which argues for a shift from an abstract concern with plant life to consider material plant lives, explores the conversations that plant worlds enable and envisages a postcolonial plantarium which encompasses plantations, pre-colonial pharmacopoeias, philosophy, phytopoetics (both visual and textual) and much more. Each of these 6-month series generate new work from the South, in particular, and are currently reaching publication as books and special issues.
A fuller list of Sarah’s individual and collaborative books include: Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-Apartheid; Johannesburg – The Elusive Metropolis; Beautiful-Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics; Negotiating the Pas:; The Making of Memory in South Africa; Loadshedding: Writing On and Over the Edge of South Africa; Planetary Hinterlands: Extraction, Abandonment and Care; Reading from the South: African Print Cultures and Oceanic Turns in the Work of Isabel Hofmeyr; Publishing from the South: A Century of Wits University Press; Postcolonial Air and Atmospheres: Environmental Crisis and Elemental Life. In addition, she has published over 70 articles and book chapters and has delivered almost fifty keynote addresses. Sarah is a committed and engaged PhD supervisor and has to date supervised nearly thirty PhDs to successful completion.