Isabel Hofmeyr
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Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor Emeritus at Wits University, based at WISER and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at New York University. She was previously Professor of African Literature at Wits and Global Distinguished Professor at NYU. Over the last three decades, she has pioneered research on global, oceanic and transnational forms of literary and cultural history that seek to understand Africa’s place in the world. She is a leading scholar of the Indian Ocean world and more recently of the Oceanic Humanities, a project she co-directed with Charne Lavery at WISER over the last 5 years. Her books include The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1994); Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (2013) and Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons (2015) (co-edited with Antoinette Burton) and Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House (2022).