Department of English
Rita Barnard retired in 2025 as Professor of English and Comparative Literature. She joined the faculty at Penn right after completing her Ph.D., which focused on twentieth-century American literature, modernism, and literary theory, at Duke University. Though she stayed at Penn for her whole career, her range was broad and her work varied. Her interests always lay at the intersection of culture and politics, which enabled her to make scholarly contributions to several fields: global modernisms, American literature (especially the 1930s), South African literature and cultural studies, the novel as genre, and, most recently, political cinema. At Penn, she served in several administrative capacities, notably as Director of the Women’s Studies Program and the Alice Paul Center for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality (2004-2011) and as Director of the undergraduate program in Comparative Literature (2013-2022). In 2005 she received the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, Penn’s highest teaching award, and, in 2010, the SAS Award for Distinguished Teaching in the School of Liberal and Professional Studies. She was also the recipient of three Mellon awards, as member of the Humanities+Urbanism+Design seminar and as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand. She also held Extraordinary Professorships at the University of Stellenbosch (2008-2016) and the University of the Western Cape (2017-2020), where she started her career during the turbulent final years of the anti-apartheid struggle. She was honored to teach at the University of Colorado at Boulder as a First Scholar for a memorable summer in 2016 and has enjoyed her long-time informal association with the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Studies in Johannesburg.
Rita Barnard is the author of The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance (Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place (Oxford University Press, 2006). She is the editor of two books: The Cambridge Companion to Nelson Mandela (Cambridge University Press, 2014), the first interdisciplinary academic study of this icon, and, with Andrew van der Vlies, South African Writing in Transition (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). One of her most prized publications is the prescient special issue of the journal Safundi on Trump, Zuma, and the Grounds of US-South African Comparison. (Here is the introduction, “Comparative Thinking in an Age of Corruption.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17533171.2020.1832795)
Barnard’s published essays have appeared in many journals including American Historical Review, American Literature, American Literary History, Comparative Literature Studies, Contemporary Literature, Critique, Cultural Critique, Development and Change, Interventions, Modern Fiction Studies, Modernist Cultures, Novel: A Forum on Fiction and Research in African Literatures. She is a contributor to several edited collections, including The Bloomsbury Handbook to J.M. Coetzee; Contemporary Revolutions; The Cambridge History of South African Literature; Modernism and Colonialism; Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism; Senses of Culture; Realism and the Novel, Writing South Africa,Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics and the Cambridge Companion to American Modernism, for which she wrote the chapter on modern American fiction. Most recently she wrote the chapter on South Africa for her eminent colleague David Wallace’s compilation of National Epics for Oxford University Press. Her favorite book in which she has appeared is The Big Bad Bitterkomix Handbook, wonderfully illustrated by the provocative creators of these notorious underground comix.
Rita Barnard has served on the editorial boards of Contemporary Literature, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, PMLA, Research in African Literatures, Tydskrif vir Letterkunde/Journal of Literary Studies, Literator, and English Studies in Africa. With Grant Farred, she edited After the Thrill is Gone: Ten Years of Democracy in South Africa, a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly and served for many years as co-editor of Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, a transformative assignment, both for herself and, aspirationally, for the field of transnational cultural studies as well.
Since her retirement, Barnard has translated and revised (in collaboration with Robert Davidson, Boer War expert extraordinaire) her late father’s meticulous and exciting book, General Louis Botha on the Natal Front, 1899-1900, published by Helion Press in 2026. (Never did she think her work would appear in a series entitled From Musket to Magnum!)
Barnard’s many Ph.D. students (and undergraduates) have excelled and will always be a source of pride and joy to her. Check out some of their books:
https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/borrowed-voices/9780813577401
https://www.dukeupress.edu/at-penpoint
https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517915803/precarious-eating/
https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/4147/
