Isabel Hofmeyr

Christine Isabel Hofmeyr (born 1953) is a South African academic who specialises in literary studies and literary history. She is professor emeritus at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she became a professor of African literature in 1994.

Quotes

• My first degree was in Journalism and English Literature so I have always had a strong interest in media. In my postgraduate work, I was soon drawn into archival research and working with old newspapers and magazines.
• My early research focused on questions of orality and literacy, an area that inevitably lead to scholarship on the early modern world and from there to the field of book history and print culture. I then began teaching a course on South African book history, edited a special issue of the South African Historical Journal on this theme and also began supervising graduates working on these themes.
  • Isabel Hofmeyr on how she developed an interest in book and print history and how it complements her other research interests
• The Internet has created both possibilities and problems. There is now much more archival material online and an astonishing array of digital books. In my generation, part of one’s training was in how to locate material in obscure archives. That now seems a bit comical, given the easy access one can have to troves and troves of material. These developments do however mean that the materiality of the objects is often obscured. One can’t see the actual document so some of the key methods of book history can’t be deployed.
  • Isabel Hofmeyr print history becoming an easier vocation to practice in the age of the Interneton