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Rita Barnard

Professor of English and Comparative Literature

Fisher-Bennett Hall 337
215-746-3770

Rita Barnard received her Ph.D. from Duke University and is currently Professor of English at Penn. She holds a secondary a position as Extraordinary Professor at the University of the Western Cape and has been a Visiting Professor at Brown University and a Mellon Distinguished Lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand. For many years, she served as Director of Penn’s Women’s Studies Program and the Alice Paul Center for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her scholarly interests lie in modernism and global modernities, South African literature and cultural studies, modern American literature (especially the literature and cultural politics the 1930s), contemporary cinema, and the novel as genre. 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. 

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 The Cambridge Companion to Nelson Mandela (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and (along with Andrew van der Vlies) South African Writing in Transition (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).  She is working on two books, South African Modernisms: Histories, Forms, Things and Postapartheid Cinema and Society, as well as a film, Imploding City. Her published essays, which cover a range of subjects in the broad field of twentieth-century literature and culture, have appeared in journals like American Literature, American Literary History, Cultural Studies, Contemporary Literature, Interventions, Modern Fiction Studies, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and Research in African Literatures. Barnard is also a contributor to several edited collections, including Contemporary Revolutions, Modernism, Postcolonialism and Globalism, 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 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, and English Studies in Africa. 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 has just stepped down as editor of Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, but continues to serve of the board of this innovative journal. (Please see our website: https://tandfonline.com/loi/rsaf20). 

Publications

Doctoral Dissertations Chaired

2023

Kenton Butcher "Ain’t No Shame: Contemporary Passing Narratives in African American and South African Literature"

2022

Aaron Bartels-Swindells "Impossible Realisms: Genre and Apartheid, 1902-1973"

2021

Augusta Atinuke Irele "Narratives of the New Diaspora: Migration and Transnationalism in Contemporary African Literature"

2020

Martin Premoli "Global Anthropocene Fiction and the Politics of Climate Disaster"

2018

B. Jamieson Stanley "The Global Environmental Novel and the Politics of Food"

2015

J. Bret Maney "Novels Wrecked by Success: American Fiction and the Problem of the Good Life: 1890-1940"

2013

Asma Al-Naser "Afterlives: Specters of the American Century in Post-WWII American and Arabic Literature"

2011

Edward Lybeer "Transnational Modernism in the Americas: Mexican and US Culture in the 1920s and 1930s"

2008

Jennifer Glaser "Exceptional Differences: The Politics and Poetics of Post-War Jewish American Literature"

2006

Stephanie Harzewski "The New Novel of Manners: Chick Lit and Postfeminist Sexual Politics"

2005

Jeff Allred "American Modernism and Depression Documentary"
Stephen G. B. Hock "Serial Postmodernism: Repetition and Innovation in Contemporary American Fiction"
Monica Popescu "South Africa in Transition: Theorizing Post-colonial, Post-apartheid, and Post-Communist Cultural Formations"

2002

Alice Brittan "Writing and Portage: The Post-Settlement Novel and Movement of Things"

Courses Taught

fall 2023

ENGL 0590.401 Cinema and Politics  
ENGL 0590.402 Cinema and Politics  
ENGL 1140.001 Modern America canceled  

spring 2023

ENGL 0518.401 Cinema and Globalization  
ENGL 0590.401 Cinema and Politics  

fall 2022

summer 2022

spring 2022

ENGL 100.401 Global Novel  

fall 2021

ENGL 392.403 Cinema and Politics  

summer 2021

spring 2021

ENGL 392.401 Cinema and Politics  

fall 2020

spring 2020

ENGL 392.401 Cinema and Politics  

fall 2019

spring 2019

ENGL 064.001 Colonial and Postcolonial Fiction canceled  

fall 2018

ENGL 392.401 Cinema and Politics  

spring 2018

ENGL 100.401 Global Novel  

fall 2017

ENGL 392.401 Cinema and Politics  
ENGL 595.640 Cinema and Politics  

spring 2017

ENGL 100.401 The Global Novel  

fall 2016

ENGL 392.401 Cinema and Politics  

spring 2016

ENGL 064.001 Modern America  

fall 2015

ENGL 392.401 Cinema and Politics  

fall 2014

ENGL 392.401 Cinema and Globalization  
ENGL 600.301 Proseminar  

spring 2014

ENGL 064.001 Modern America  

fall 2013

ENGL 392.401 Cinema and Globalization  

spring 2013

ENGL 064.001 Modern America  

fall 2012

ENGL 600.301 Proseminar  

spring 2012

ENGL 572.401 South African Literature  

fall 2011

ENGL 064.001 Modern America  
ENGL 292.401 Cinema and Globalization  

fall 2010

ENGL 292.401 Cinema and Globalization  
ENGL 592.641 Cinema and Globalization  

spring 2010

ENGL 293.401 Postapartheid Literature  

fall 2009

ENGL 064.001 Modern America  

summer 2009

spring 2009

ENGL 361.301 War and Literature  

fall 2008

summer 2007

ENGL 040.900 Romantics to Moderns canceled  

spring 2007

fall 2006

ENGL 775.401 South African Literature  

summer 2006

spring 2006

ENGL 104.401 The 20th Century and War  

fall 2005

ENGL 299.301 J.M. Coetzee  
ENGL 797.401 Modern America  

spring 2005

ENGL 104.401 The Twentieth Century  
ENGL 775.401 South African Literature  

fall 2004

ENGL 090.401 Women and Literature  

spring 2004

ENGL 384.301 Modern America  

fall 2003

ENGL 998.005 Independent Study  

spring 2003

fall 2002

ENGL 100.401 Literary Study  
ENGL 586.401 J.M. Coetzee  

summer 2002

ENGL 104.950 The Twentieth Century  

fall 2000

ENGL 090.401 Women & Literature  
ENGL 775.401 South African Literature  

spring 2000

ENGL 199.306 Waiting For Nothing  
ENGL 299.301 Vladimir Nabokov  
ENGL 299.312 Rushdie: East and West  

fall 1999

ENGL 799.401 American Literature  

spring 1999

fall 1998

ENGL 104.401 The Twentieth Century  
ENGL 572.601 Lit.: Apartheid & Democracy  
ENGL 998.032 Independent Study  

spring 1998

ENGL 309.301 Junior Honors Seminar  

fall 1997

ENGL 265.401 Topics in Modern British Novel canceled  

fall 1996

ENGL 299.311 American Film in the 1930's  
ENGL 572.401 South African Literature  

spring 1996

ENGL 204.401 Literary Theory  

fall 1995

ENGL 104.001 The Twentieth Century  
ENGL 591.401 American Modernism  

spring 1995

ENGL 572.301 South African Literature  

fall 1994