Professor David Johnson

Professional biography

My research interests include Post-colonial Literature and Theory, Shakespeare Studies, Southern African Studies, Law and Literature, and Eighteenth-Century Travel Writing. I have written two monographs, Shakespeare and South Africa (Oxford University Press, 1996) and Imagining the Cape Colony. History, Literature and the South African Nation (Edinburgh University Press/ UCT Press, 2012); was the principal author with Steve Pete and Max du Plessis of Jurisprudence: A South African Perspective (Butterworths, 2001); and was the co-editor with Prem Poddar of A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English (Edinburgh/ Columbia University Press, 2005) and with Caroline Davis of The Book in Africa: Critical Debates (Palgrave, 2015). I was series editor with Ania Loomba of the Edinburgh University Press series Postcolonial Literary Studies, and am series editor of the ongoing Edinburgh University Press series Key Texts in Anti-colonial Thought. I was also a co-investigator on the AHRC-funded project ‘The Indian Ocean: Narratives of Literature and Law’.

My teaching interests lie principally in Postcolonial Literature, and especially Southern African literature and history. However, during the last decade, I have written Open University teaching material on a variety of writers, and across a range of periods and genres (Shakespeare, Swift, Goethe, Byron, Cugoano, Bushman Folklore, Grassic Gibbon, post-apartheid poetry, Calvino and Salih). Some of this teaching material has been co-published: with Richard Danson Brown Shakespeare 1609: ‘Cymbeline’ and the ‘Sonnets’ (Macmillan, 2000); edited with Richard Danson Brown A Shakespeare Reader: Sources and Criticism (Macmillan, 2000); edited The Popular and the Canonical. Debating Twentieth-Century Literature 1940-2000 (Routledge, 2005); edited with Suman Gupta A Twentieth-Century Literature Reader: Texts and Debates (Routledge, 2005); and edited with Anita Pacheco The Renaissance and Long Eighteenth Century (Bloomsbury, 2012).