The Department of Comparative Literature, Indiana University, invites you to the Wertheim Lecture in Comparative Drama:
October 3, 2013, 4:30 p.m. at the Lilly Library
“The Play’s the Thing: A Journey through the Drama of South Africa”
by Professor Dennis Walder
Dennis Walder is Emeritus Professor of Literature at the UK’s Open University. He is the former director of the Open University’s Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies, as well as the founding director of the Post-Colonial Literatures Research Group. A graduate of the University of Cape Town, Professor Walder completed his doctoral degree as Aytoun Research Fellow in English at the University of Edinburgh. Professor Walder’s research interests range from 19th-century fiction to 20th-century literature. His thesis was published as Dickens and Religion (1981; reissued 2007). 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 Oxford University Press. In 2003, he produced a new study of the playwright, Athol Fugard, in the series “Writers and Their Work.” He regularly writes program notes and gives theatre talks for performances of Fugard.
Professor Walder has contextualized his research on South African drama in Post-Colonial Literatures: History, Language, Theory (1998). His 2000 essay “The Necessity of Error: Memory and Representation in the New Literatures” began a series of papers and journal articles on topics linking memory, identity and narrative in post-colonial contexts, leading up to his most recent book Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Memory and Representation (2010).
The Wertheim Lecture in Comparative Drama commemorates Albert Wertheim’s contributions to the field of Comparative Drama. Wertheim, who passed away in April 2003, was Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Theatre and Drama.