Prof. Lucy Graham

Associate Professor
Name: Lucy Valerie Graham
Location: B Ring 717 Auckland Park Kingsway Campus
  Staff Members

Contact Details:
Tel: 0115592716

Email: lvgraham@uj.ac.za

About Prof. Lucy Graham

Lucy Valerie Graham is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Johannesburg. She has a doctorate in English literature from the University of Oxford, and MA, BA Honours, and BA degrees from the university currently known as Rhodes. Her first monograph, State of Peril: Race and Rape in South African Literature (2012), was published by Oxford University Press. She is the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, and is working on two new monographs, on J.M. Coetzee and gender, and one entitled “Post-Apartheid Dissonance”, about the cultural politics of post-“rainbow nation” South Africa. She is co-editor, with Andrew van der Vlies, of the Bloomsbury Handbook to J.M. Coetzee (2023). Her research interests include South African and African literature and culture, interdisciplinary studies, and debates on intersectionality and decoloniality. Her new work includes a focus on ecocriticism, including cultural rights and the environment.

In 2013-14 she was a Fulbright Scholar at New York University, where she taught courses in the English Department. At NYU she also organised a colloquium in 2014 on “South Africa after Twenty Years of Democracy” (outputs available in the journal Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies). In 2017 she was project manager of The Mendi Centenary Project, for which she received a British Academy Grant. In April 2018 she toured universities in the US with a group of students from the University of the Western Cape who presented on “Fallism and the cultural politics of decolonisation.” In May-June 2022 she was in Brazil by invitation to present in a series of seminars and events on “Decolonising the arts and social sciences.” In December 2024 she was invited to give a keynote address in an AHRC-funded workshop at Durham Law School on “Extractive Industries and the Foreign Security Network”. In 2025 she presented a paper at the University of Edinburgh’s Centre of African Studies Conference on “Climate Dynamics and the Politics of a Post-Carbon Africa”, and a paper entitled “From the Mountain to the Sea: Cultural Rights v Extractivism” in seminars at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford.

Publications:

Monographs:

State of Peril: Race and Rape in South African Literature, Oxford University Press, 2012.

Articles in peer-reviewed accredited journals:

Forthcoming:

“Lewis Nkosi and the Politics of Pen”, Current Writing: Text and Reception in South Africa, 2025.

“Pan-Africanism Resurgent? The Rise of PASMA at the University of the Western Cape”, with Xolani Zekani, Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, 2025

Published:

“Queer Spaces, Africanness and Bildung: The Quiet Violence of Dreams and Inxeba in Conversation,” with Ntokozo Wandile Mbokazi, The Thinker,  Quarter 1 2025.

“On Plato, Pyramids and Port Elizabeth: Jennifer Ord and Poststructuralism.” Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa. June 2024.

“In the beginning was the collective…: Fallism, collectives, and ‘leaderlessness’“, with Khanyisile Mbongwa, Safundi: Journal of South African and American Studies, Vol. 23. 2022.

“Falling: Literature and leaderless movements”, Research in African Literatures, Spring 2022.

“The Themis Project and ‘The Vietnam Project’: J.M. Coetzee in the United States, 1968-1971”, Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa, June 2022.

“Decolonising Adamastor: From The Lusiads to Thirteen Cents”, Journal of Literary Studies, June 2022.

“Es’kia Mphahlele and the Censors”, Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa, December 2020.

“On misogyny and the women who say ‘no‘”, Safundi: Journal of South African and American Studies, Special issue edited by Rita Barnard, 2020.

“Intercepting Disgrace: Lacuna and ‘Letter to John Coetzee’”, Safundi: Journal of South African and American Studies, April 2020.

“A captured occupation?: On NGOs, accountability and grassroots movements”, Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa, June 2018.

“‘Utterly Divided’?: The Feminist Perspectives of Lauretta Ngcobo and Olive Schreiner, Scrutiny2, 2017.

“Olive Schreiner and Rhodes Must Fall”, Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa, December 2016.

Introduction, as guest editor, special issue on “South Africa After Two Decades of Democracy”, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 18 Issue 6, 2016.

“Representing Marikana”, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Vol 18. Issue 6, 2016.

“‘Then you are a man, my son’: Kipling and the Zuma rape trial”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (Duke University), Vol. 36. No. 2, 2016.

“‘We used to work together’: Life & Times of a Caretaker in Sea Point”, with Hugh Macmillan, Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa, July 2016.

“‘A Strange Antipathy’: Elsa Joubert and ‘Poppie Nongena‘”, Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa, December 2014.

“‘Bucks Without Hair’ and ‘Bullet Points’: Social and Metacommentary in Justin Cartwright’s In Every Face I Meet”, with Andrea Thorpe, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, March 2014, vol.49. no. 1 47-62.

“The Importance of Confronting a Colonial, Patriarchal and Racist Past in Addressing Post-apartheid Sexual Violence”, African Safety Promotion, Volume 11, No. 2, December 2013.

“The ‘Great Coloured Question’ and the Cosmopolitan: Fiction, History and Politics in David’s Story”, with Hugh Macmillan, Safundi: The Journal of American and South African Studies, Special Issue on “Zoë Wicomb: The Cape and the Cosmopolitan”, 12.3&4, 2011: 331-347.

“Amakwerekwere and Other Aliens: District 9 and Hospitality,” District 9: A Roundtable, Safundi: The Journal of American and South African Studies, 11.1 (2010): 155-175.

“Consequential Changes’: Daphne Rooke’s Mittee in America and South Africa”, Safundi: The Journal of American and South African Studies, 10.1, 2009: 43-58.

“Baby Tshepang and post-apartheid narratives”, Scrutiny2, 13.1, 2008.

“Reimagining the Cave: Gender, Land and Imperialism in Olive Schreiner’s Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland,” English Studies in Africa, 50.1, 2007: 25-40.

“Reading the Unspeakable: Rape in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace”, Journal of Southern African Studies, 29.2, 2003: 433-444.

“A Hidden Side to the Story”: Reading Rape in Recent South African Literature”, Journal of Post-Colonial Writing, 24.1&2, 2002: 9-24.

“Yes, I Am Giving Him Up”: Sacrificial Responsibility in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace”, Scrutiny2, 7.2, 2002: 4-15.

Book chapters:

“Rereading Mating Birds”, in Lewis Nkosi: The Black Psychiatrist/ Flying Home, Critical Perspectives and Homage, eds. Henrichsen Dag, Astrid Starck, Basel: Basler Afrika, 2021.

“‘Consequential Changes’: Daphne Rooke’s Mittee in America and South Africa”, Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa, ed. Andrew van der Vlies, Wits University Press, 2012.

“Textual Transvestism: The Female Voices of J.M. Coetzee”, J.M. Coetzee: The Ethics of Intellectual Practice, ed. Jane Poyner, Ohio University Press, 2006.

“‘Bathing Area – for Whites Only’ : Reading Prohibitive Signs and “Black Peril” in Mating Birds”, Still Beating the Drum: Critical Perspectives on Lewis Nkosi, ed. Lindy Stiebel, Rodopi, 2005, and Wits University Press, 2006.

“Reading the Unspeakable: Rape in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace”, Versions/ Subversions, Published Conference Proceedings, Conference on African Literature, Berlin, Germany, May 2002. Rodopi 2005.

Lewis Nkosi, World Writers in English, Thomson Gale, 2003.

J.M. Coetzee, World Writers in English, Thomson Gale, 2003.