Sanja Nivesjö

Short presentation

I am Associate Senior Lecturer and Director of Studies for the MA-level at the Centre for Gender Research.

My current research project concerns the depiction of interracial love in literature from South Africa and Zimbabwe, 1900-1950. I have a forthcoming book with Manchester UP based on my PhD on sexuality and spatiality in South African literature.

My research interests are in South African literature, queer theory, sexualities, solidarity, postcolonial studies, and theories of space.

Keywords

• sexualities
• queer theory
• geographies of sexualities
• spatiality
• postcolonial studies
• solidarity
• critical race theory
• temporality
• South African literature
• African literature
• anglophone literature

Biography

I obtained my PhD in English literature from Stockholm University and Justus Liebig University Giessen in 2020 with the dissertation Dis-placed Desires: Space and Sexuality in South African Literature.

I was a visiting researcher at the African Feminist Initiative at Penn State, USA in 2018 and at Stellenbosch University, South Africa in 2016. Between 2021-2023 I did my Swedish Research Council funded postdoc at the University of Salford, UK.

Teaching

At the Centre for Gender Research, I teach on the A course and B course, humanioraprogrammet, and the MA courses Intersectionality and Power, Feminist Cultural Studies, Globalisation Race and Privileges. I also supervise BA and MA essays, and act as secondary supervisor to a PhD student from the Department of English, Uppsala University.

Editorial responsibilities

I am co-subject editor for Nordic Journal of African Studies and on the editorial board for International Journal of Critical Diversity Studies.

Research

Current research

I am currently engaged in a project on Interracial Love in Literature from Southern Africa, 1900-1950 (funded by the Swedish Research Council 2021-2023) looking at the representation of interracial love in Southern African literature from the first half of the twentieth century. In this project I look at authors such as Peter Abrahams, Perceval Gibbons, Douglas Blackburn, William Plomer.

I am affiliated with the South African Modernism project. Within this project, I have been engaged in making a short documentary about creative work in South Africa, writing on decolonised filmmaking, and organising workshops and conferences on decolonising literature studies.

Previous research

My doctoral research Dis-placed Desires: Space and Sexuality in South African Literature identified the entanglement of space and sexuality as a trope in South African 20th and 21st-century literature which responds to the country’s history of colonial and apartheid racial segregation and prohibition of interracial sex. I looked at authors R.R.R. Dhlomo, Olive Schreiner, Bessie Head, J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Damon Galgut, and Phaswane Mpe.

Media

Researcher on the short documentary film All That Is Buried, 2022.

Interviewed by Pil Saugmann, Episode 8: Dis-placed Desires: Space and Sexuality in South African Literature, Nyfiken Podcast, Sept 2021.

Short Story Review: Sanja Nivesjö and Sigi Vandewinkel “Review Caine 2021: Leaps of Faith – Troy Onyango’s ‘This Little Light of Mine.’” Africa in Words, 15.07.21.

Essay: “Queer Movements: Sexual Desire, Space and Home in Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow.” LitNet, 27.08.14.

Blog posts within the South African Modernism project:

"Salford and Uppsala: Forms and Formations of African Literatures." with Maria Zirra, Jade Munslow Ong, 21.06.2024.

"Tangier Film Festival." with Maire Tracey, 16.11.2023.

“Research Trip to South Africa July-September 2022.” with Jade Munslow Ong, 11.09.22.

"Liquid Modernity/Leaking Bodies in 1920s South African Literature." 17.12.21