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Louise Bethlehem is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and in the Program in Cultural Studies which she formerly chaired. She graduated from Wits in 1984 and proceeded to obtain her M.A. and Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University. She held a Lady Davis Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1998, and is currently a fellow of the Africa Unit of the Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace there. Her fields of expertise include literary theory, history and historiography of South African literature, South African cultural history, cultural studies, postcolonialism and trauma studies.
Louise Bethlehem’s book,Skin Tight: Apartheid Literary Culture and its Aftermath (Unisa Press, Brill 2006), investigates the role of literature in contexts of severe political oppression and resistance. It traces the responses to this question provided by the emergent paradigm of South African literary studies from the 1970s onwards. The volume was recently published in Hebrew translation by the Tel Aviv publishing house, Resling, with a new preface by the author and the translator, Oded Wolkstein which positions it as an “emergent allegory” for this constituency (Resling 2011).
Louise Bethlehem has co-edited numerous volumes, including South Africa in the Global Imaginary in collaboration with Leon de Kock and Sonja Narunsky Laden (Unisa 2004). Originally a themed issue of the journal, Poetics Today, it won the prestigious Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) award for the best special issue of the year 2001. Other volumes include Violence & Non-Violence in Africa, co-edited with Pal Ahluwalia and Ruth Ginio (Routledge, 2007); the special centenary edition of English Studies in Africa, co-edited with Reingard Nethersole and Michael Titlestad (2008); as well as Rethinking Labour in Africa, Past and Present, co-edited with Lynn Schler and Galia Sabar (Routledge, 2010). She wrote the entry on South African literature for the Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth Century Literature in English, edited by Brian McHale and Randall Stevenson (2006), and contributed a chapter entitled “The Pleasures of the Political: Apartheid and Post-Apartheid South African Fiction” to the Modern Language Association’s volume Teaching the African Novel, edited by Gaurav Desai (2009). She has published widely on the work of J. M. Coetzee.
In addition to serving on the board of Safundi, she is a member of the international editorial boards of African Identities, African Studies, Critical Arts: A Journal of South-North Cultural and Media Studies, English Studies in Africa, and Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa.
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