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Andrew van der Vlies was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, and was educated at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa (BA in English and Law, BA Hons in English, MA) and at the University of Oxford (MPhil, DPhil). He taught at the University of Sheffield from February 2005 to January 2010, when he took up a post in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London.
Andrew's areas of expertise include South African literatures and literary cultures, Anglophone postcolonial writing, and print and book histories. His first book, South African Textual Cultures (Manchester University Press, 2007; distributed in the US by Palgrave Macmillan), a study of the reception and construction of a ‘South African’ literature in English, from 1880 to the present, has been warmly received in the scholarly press. The Times Literary Supplement reviewer wrote that it ‘offers a lucid and accessible analysis of the effects local and global networks have had on the publication, promotion and reception of fiction and poetry in the country’ (Elizabeth Lowry, 5 September 2008: 23). Leading postcolonial critic Laura Chrisman called it ‘a pathbreaking book’, ‘interdisciplinary research [that] establishes van der Vlies as a first rate literary critic, historian and cultural sociologist' (SHARP News 18.4 [August 2009]: 19.) The book includes chapters on Olive Schreiner, William Plomer, Roy Campbell, Alan Paton, Alex La Guma, J.M. Coetzee, and Zakes Mda.
A reader’s guide to J.M. Coetzee’s 1999 novel Disgrace was published by Continuum in March 2010. Andrew also contributed to The Oxford Companion to the Book (2010), for which he was an associate editor. Forthcoming publications include a chapter on the status of South African literature in the global imagination (for the forthcoming Cambridge History of South African Literature, edited by Derek Attridge and David Attwell), and essays on South African authors J.M. Coetzee (in the forthcoming MLA Approaches volume edited by Laura Wright, Jayne Poyner and Elleke Boehmer), Nadine Gordimer, and Zoë Wicomb (in the Journal of Southern African Studies), amongst others.
Andrew reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement, where he has published on, amongst others, J.M. Coetzee, André Brink, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe, Mark Behr, and Jonty Driver. In 2008, he published a long interview with South African poet and politician Jeremy Cronin in the leading American journal Contemporary Literature.
He serves on the editorial board of Scrutiny2, and is a co-editor of SAFUNDI.
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Safundi
c/o Andrew Offenburger
Department of History
Yale University
P.O. Box 208324
New Haven, CT 06520-8324
Safundi Book Reviews
c/o Shane Graham
shane.graham@usu.edu
(435) 797-2719
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