Exploring Women, Narrative and the Structures that Shape Their Lives

I am a writer and scholar specialising in contemporary literature by women. I recently completed a PhD, Heterotopia and Contemporary South African Literature by Anglophone Women Writers, which explores how women authors reimagine space, belonging, and power, and how their narratives construct alternative sites of resistance and possibility.

Before turning fully to academic and creative work, I practised as a lawyer for more than three decades, specialising in litigation arising from serious injuries and clinical negligence. That experience sharpened my awareness of the social, cultural, and legal structures through which authority is produced and contested. Questions of voice, silence, testimony, and credibility continue to shape both my scholarship and my fiction.

My research examines representations of women in contemporary fiction, with particular attention to the constraints that shape their lives. I am especially interested in disability, social stigma, legitimacy, and intergenerational inheritance – how identities are formed across space and time, and how women negotiate systems that seek to define them.

Alongside my critical work, I write fiction.

Doctoral Project

My doctoral research investigates how contemporary South African women novelists writing in English deploy heterotopic spaces to shape female experience. Focusing on key sites such as islands, zoos, gardens, and suburbs, the project argues that these ambivalent spaces function both as mechanisms of constraint and as potential zones of transformation.

Drawing on an interdisciplinary and intertextual methodology, the thesis analyses novels by Marguerite Poland, Henrietta Rose-Innes, Claire Robertson, Zoë Wicomb, and Yewande Omotoso. Spanning historical, realist, and speculative modes across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, these works reveal how women characters of different generations negotiate the social and spatial structures that delimit their lives.

By tracing recurring intergenerational patterns within the fiction, the study suggests that while older women characters’ attempts at resistance are often curtailed, younger women characters increasingly appropriate space in order to reconfigure their identities and environments. In bringing spatial and temporal dynamics into dialogue, the project highlights both the persistence of discrimination and the emergence of cautious, generative hope.

Monograph in Development

Intended readership: Scholars and students of South African literature, feminist and postcolonial studies, and interdisciplinary research on culture, history, and social transformation.

Current and Future Research

Building on this transnational analysis, I propose undertaking a pilot study exploring the female traumatised or disabled body as a heterotopic site in Dangarembga’s fiction. This project would progress heterotopic analysis from external sites to corporeal spaces. It would allow for an examination of the ways in which trauma inscribes itself onto the body and how the body itself becomes a site of negotiation and resistance.

Research Interests

• Representation of women and gendered experience in fiction
• Comparative and transnational Anglophone literatures
• Feminist and intersectional literary analysis
• Spatial Theory
• Medical humanities
• Normativity, embodiment, disability, and legitimacy
• Social regulation, stigma, and institutional frameworks
• Intergenerational memory, inheritance, and resilience

Alongside my critical work, I am writing a historical novel set in Britain, a project which operates as research in practice

I welcome collaboration, postdoctoral research opportunities and academic partnerships.

Fiction