Dennis Walder is Emeritus Professor of Literature, former Director of The Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies, and was founding Director of the Department’s lively Post-Colonial Literatures Research Group. A graduate of the Universities of Cape Town and Edinburgh, he was Aytoun Research Fellow in English at the University of Edinburgh while completing his PhD under the supervision of K.J. Fielding. His thesis was published as a book on Dickens and Religion, reissued as a Routledge paperback in 2007. His long career with the OU, going back to the 1970s, reflects a lifelong commitment to its ideals. He was promoted to a Chair in 1999.
Dennis’s research interests range from 19th century fiction to 20th century literature. He published the first book on South Africa’s best-known playwright, Athol Fugard, in 1984, and he has since edited three volumes of Fugard’s plays for OUP (re-issued 2001), and in 2003, produced a new and comprehensive study of the playwright (Athol Fugard, Writers and Their Work). He regularly writes programme notes and gives theatre talks for performances of Fugard.
Dennis’s book Post-Colonial Literatures: History, Language, Theory was published by Blackwell in 1998. ‘The Necessity of Error: Memory and Representation in the New Literatures’, an essay published in 2000, began a series of papers and journal articles on topics linking memory, identity and narrative in post-colonial contexts, leading up to Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Memory and Representation (Routledge, 2010).
Editing Penguin Classics and Oxford’s World’s Classics for many years was accompanied by extensive reviewing for The Listener, Times Higher, TLS, and many other periodicals. His well-known critical anthology, Literature in the Modern World, first published in 1990 by OUP, and revised and expanded for a second edition in 2003, has sold over 50,000 copies.
Dennis has taught and lectured on topics ranging from Shakespeare to the present day in the UK and abroad (e.g. see his Blackwell Lecture Edinburgh, 2004); he has written and broadcast for numerous Open University courses, from the Arts Foundation through to MA level, including The Realist Novel (1995) on Approaching Literature, as well as Identities (2001), on the Nineteenth Century Novel course, which he also chaired. He is currently writing for the Department’s forthcoming Reading and studying literature course, on Othello and W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants.
Dennis has supervised successful PhDs on, for example, Dickens, Bessie Head, Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka and Zakes Mda He was Director of the AHRC-funded project, The Colonial and Post-Colonial History of the Book (2004-7). More recently, he initiated with Yvette Hutchison of Warwick University a Leverhulme-funded collaborative project worth c£142k (2010-2012), on ‘Performing Memory: theatricalising identity in contemporary South Africa’. He has published short stories, is currently engaged in further creative writing, and is on the Europe/Asia panel of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2011.
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