11 Facts About Isabel Hofmeyr

Christine Isabel Hofmeyr was born on 1953 and is a South African academic who specialises in literary studies and literary history.

Isabel Hofmeyr is particularly well known for her work in postcolonialism and work on textual circulation, textual transnationalism, and the Indian Ocean world.

Isabel Hofmeyr entered Rhodes University in 1972 and graduated in 1974 with a Bachelor of Journalism.

Isabel Hofmeyr left the following year to join the South African Committee for Higher Education, a non-profit anti-apartheid organisation, where she co-wrote an adult education series on African studies.

Isabel Hofmeyr left that job in 1982 to take up a two-year Master of Arts degree at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where was supported by a British Council scholarship and studied area studies with a concentration on Africa.

Isabel Hofmeyr was hired as a lecturer in the department in 1988 and completed her PhD in the department in 1991; her dissertation was titled, "'We Spend Our Years as a Tale that is Told': Oral Storytelling, Literacy and Historical Narrative in the Changing Context of a Transvaal Chiefdom".

Isabel Hofmeyr has remained in that position until her retirement; she is currently professor emeritus at Wits, where she is based at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research.

Isabel Hofmeyr served stints as head of the African Studies department and as an assistant dean in the Wits Humanities Faculty, and she was chairperson of the Wits University Press advisory committee between 1997 and 2001.

Isabel Hofmeyr has served on the editorial board of related journals, including Modern Asian Studies.

The third, Gandhi's Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading, studies the production of Indian Opinion, the newspaper founded by Mahatma Gandhi and printed at his ashram in Phoenix, Natal; Isabel Hofmeyr argued that the material production of the newspaper supported and informed the Gandhian philosophy of satyagraha.

On 11 October 2017, Isabel Hofmeyr was inaugurated as a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa.