I am an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Pretoria (UP), South Africa, and co-director of the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South project (www.oceanichumanities.com). I research in the wider field of the environmental humanities, focused mostly on literary and cultural representations of the sea. This includes the Indian Ocean, the deep sea and seabed, and the Southern Ocean and Antarctic seas, exploring ocean cultures of the global South in a time of global environmental change.
I completed my DPhil in English at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and BA (Hons) at the University of Cape Town. I teach widely in literary studies, largely in postcolonial literatures or from that perspective, and co-convene the large first year course at UP with up to two thousand registered students. I am currently the principal investigator on a South African National Antarctic Programme (SANAP) grant of the National Research Foundation (NRF), on an African 'Antarctic Artists and Writers Programme (AWP) Pilot', a founding member of the Seabed Humanities Collective, co-editor of the Palgrave book series Maritime Literature and Culture, and involved in a number of other teaching and research activities.
