Rita Barnard, who received her Ph.D. from Duke University, is currently Professor of English and Director of Women’s Studies and the Alice Paul Center for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Pennsylvania. She also holds an appointment as Professor Extraordinaire at the University of Stellenbosch. Her scholarly interests include postcolonial studies (especially African and South African literature), modernism, globalization and transnational cultural studies, twentieth-century American literature, and contemporary women writers. In 2005 she received the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Barnard’s first book The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance was published by Cambridge University Press in 1995; her second, Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place came out from Oxford in 2007.  She is currently at work on two book projects: one is on modernism and (the idea of) Africa and the other on national literature in an era of globalization, focusing on postapartheid South Africa. Barnard's published essays, which cover a wide range of subjects in the field of twentieth-century literature and culture, have appeared in journals like American Literature, American Literary History, Contemporary Literature, Interventions, Modern Fiction Studies, Postmodern Culture, and Research in African Literatures. She is a contributor to several edited collections, including Senses of Culture, Writing South Africa, The Big Bad Bitterkomix Handbook, Beautiful Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics, Modernism and Colonialism, and the Cambridge Companion to American Modernism, for which she wrote the chapter on modern American fiction. Rita Barnard serves on the editorial boards of PMLA, Contemporary Literature, Novel: A Forum on Fiction and Tydskrif vir Letterkunde/Journal of Literary Studies. Along with Grant Farred, she co-edited After the Thrill is Gone: Ten Years of Democracy in South Africa, a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly. She is editor-in-chief of Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies. Please see our website: www.safundi.com