Welcome back to Season 4 of Living While Feminist! Thank you for tuning in. Don't forget to rate, review, subscribe and share!

Today on the podcast I’m talking with feminist literary scholar and award-winning author, Dr Barbara Boswell. Barbara is the Head of the English Department at the University of Cape Town. She has taught gender studies and African women’s literature at the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in the USA, as well as the University of Cape Town and the University of the Western Cape.

She earned a PhD from the Department of Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she studied as a Fulbright Scholar. Her MPhil was completed at the Women’s and Gender Studies Programme at the University of the Western Cape.

Barbara is the author of the award-winning Grace, a novel that was published by Modjadji Books in 2017 and won the University of Johannesburg Debut Creative Writing Prize in 2018. It was published in the United States in 2019 as Unmaking Grace. Grace has been deservedly praised by many, including the Kirkus Review, which called it “a smart, compassionate portrayal of one woman’s quest to end the cycle of violence.”

Barbara’s writing and academic activism espouses her belief in writing as a feminist and spiritual practice, and as a practice that can heal trauma and build connections. Her research interests include postcolonial African literature, feminism, and post coloniality, queer theory, black feminist thought, and intersectional feminist theory, and she has published multiple academic works and papers on these topics.

In 2020, Barbara published And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women’s Novel’s as Feminism (published by Wits University Press). The collection archives the work of several women writers, exploring their writing as a source and site of feminist theory. This year she also published an essay in Surfacing, a collection edited by fellow feminist literary scholars Desiree Lewis and Gabeba Baderoon.

In an interview with Catalyst Press about her novel, Grace, Barbara says:

“I see myself as a literary activist, an arts activist using my work to create change and a more socially just world for women and other marginalized communities.”

So today I’m going to be talking to Barbara about feminism, the responsibilities and rights of feminist writers, and the power of telling stories to change our future, and our understanding of the past.