Stephen Clingman's work has ranged from South African literature and biography
to postcolonial and transnational fiction. His first book was The Novels Of Nadine
Gordimer: History From The Inside (1986; 2nd edn, Bloomsbury/UMass Press, 1992), and his
edited collection of essays by Nadine Gordimer, The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics
And Places (Jonathan Cape/Knopf, 1988), has been translated into a number of languages; a
separate edition, Leben im Interregnum: Essays zu Politik und Literatur, was published in
Germany in 1987. His Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary (David Philip/UMass Press,
1998), a biography of the white Afrikaner who led Nelson Mandela's legal defense at
the Rivonia Trial, won the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award, South Africa's premier
prize for non-fiction. His most recent book, The Grammar of Identity: Transnational
Fiction and the Nature of the Boundary (Oxford University Press, 2009), is a study of
writers ranging from Joseph Conrad to Caryl Phillips, Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, W. G.
Sebald, Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee.
Articles and interviews by Stephen Clingman have appeared in book collections as well as
journals such as Modern Fiction Studies, Journal of Southern African Studies, Salmagundi,
and Transition, and he has written reviews for the New York Times and the Boston Globe.
He has also held fellowships at a variety of institutions internationally, including the
Southern African Research Program (Yale University), the African Studies Institute
(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg), the Society for the Humanities (Cornell
University), and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (Washington, D.C.).
Stephen's papers for the Fischer biography are now held at the Bodleian Library in
Oxford. At the University of Massachusetts he has given the introductions for two
visiting Nobel Prize-winners, Nadine Gordimer, and J. M. Coetzee, as well as writers such
as Salman Rushdie and Caryl Phillips.
Stephen regularly teaches courses on South African Literature and Politics, Studies in
Twentieth-Century Fiction (Writing at the Frontiers), and Transnational Fiction. ISHA,
which he has directed since 2001, runs year-long faculty seminars on a range of themes
and hosts the ISHA Residency.
