Barbara Boswell is a writer and Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Cape Town.

 

She is the author of two award-winning works of fiction, The Comrade's Wife (2024) and Grace: A Novel (2017).

 

Her academic monograph, And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women Novels as Feminism (Wits University Press, 2020) examines how Black South African women writers use fiction as a tool of activism, a black feminist praxis, and a way of transforming the self and society. It excavates the often-ignored intellectual and literary contributions of Black women in South Africa, casting their novels as sites of theory production.

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She is also the editor of Lauretta Ngcobo: Writing as the Practice of Freedom, a book of selected writing by Lauretta Ngcobo, compiled and analysed by Boswell.

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At the University of Cape Town, Barbara teaches Black diasporic women’s writing, Black South African women’s literature, and queer theory.  She earned her PhD in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2010, after joining the Department of Women’s Studies as a Fulbright Scholar. Barbara has also worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia and was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Oxford at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing in 2024.

 

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