My first book, South African Textual Cultures (Manchester University Press, 2007), considered the construction of the idea of an anglophone South African literature through a series of case studies of the publication and reception histories of authors from Olive Schreiner, Alan Paton, and Alex La Guma, to J.M. Coetzee and Zakes Mda. Rita Barnard (UPenn) called it ‘the first major study to question the very category of “South African literature” and to describe the process of its construction in a sustained, engaging, theoretically astute manner’. I continue to write about and facilitate work on African and South African print cultures: I contributed the essay on "The History of the Book in Sub-Saharan Africa" to the Oxford Companion to the Book (2010), for which I also acted as an associate editor; Wits University Press published my edited reader Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa in 2012.

Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing (Oxford University Press, 2017), mobilizes an understanding of disappointment as description of affect and of temporality (a missed appointment with a future imagined by the anti-apartheid movement) to consider how postapartheid writing engages temporality, genre, and form in its treatment of the fate of the hope that attended the birth of the ‘new’ nation in 1994. Considering in detail work in English and in Afrikaans, it assesses writers’ engagements with a range of negative feelings that are also experiences of temporal disjuncture, including stasis, impasse, boredom, disaffection, and nostalgia. Simon Gikandi (Princeton) calls the book ‘one of the most lucid and original reflections on South African writing after Apartheid’. Derek Attridge (York) says it ‘provides an insightful, absorbing and theoretically astute investigation of the status of contemporary South African literature’.

I have published elsewhere on Gordimer and on Coetzee (both the focus of chapters in my 2017 monograph), including a short book on Disgrace, a chapter in the Cambridge Companion to J. M. Coetzee, and in the Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee, which I co-edited. I have co-edited special issues of journals on South Africa and the global mediascape and contributed chapters to the Cambridge History of South African Literature (2012) and the Oxford History of the Novel in English (vol. 11, 2016). I have also published on sexuality, politics and performance in contemporary South African art. In February 2019, Bloomsbury Academic published South African Writing in Transition, a multi-author collection of essays on postapartheid literature, which I co-edited with Rita Barnard.

Race, Nation, Translation: South African Essays, 1990-2013, an edited collection of essays by the late, prizewinning South African-born writer Zoë Wicomb, was published by Yale University Press in the US and UK and by Wits University Press in South Africa (2018). You can hear me talking with David Attwell about Wicomb's final novel, Still Life, on the LitNet podcast 'Full Particulars' here (June 2021). I co-edited theOlive Schreiner: Writing Networks and Global Contents (Edinburgh UP, 2023) with Jade Munslow Ong, a colleague at the University of Salford, with whom I have co-edited a Cambridge History of South African Modernism (in press). 

I served as Lead Editor of the Taylor and Francis journal Safundi for a decade, and continue to serve on its editorial board, as well as on the boards of several other peer-reviewed journals. 

Alongside my scholarly work, I am developing a practice as a translator; my translations of poetry by the Afrikaans-language poet Sheila Cussons have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation (2020, No. 3), The Denver Quarterly (vol 55, no. 2, 2021), and the online journal Asymptote (Summer 2021), and Georgia University Press will in November 2027 publish my translation of Karel Schoeman's Die noorderlig (1975).