I graduated with my PhD in the English Department at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa in April 2016. I am also currently completing a postgraduate diploma in Higher Education, with expected completion in December 2022. I have worked in higher education since 2012, beginning as a tutor at the English Department and lecturer with the English for Educational Development (EED) team at the University of the Western Cape from 2012 to 2016, where I taught academic literacies and literature at undergraduate level. In this role, I began to develop my interest in teaching and learning development and innovation. I acted as the course coordinator for the English for Educational Development course for Nursing students.
I was appointed as a lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) School of Education in 2018 in the Division of Languages, Literacies and Literatures, and was subsequently promoted to Senior Lecturer within this Division. My background in literature, media studies and academic literacy education helped to shape my research and teaching trajectories in this role. I published multiple articles in recognised South African and international journals since starting in this position, with more than 15 published journal articles and 5 book chapters, as well as a sole-authored book based on my PhD research. My research interests are in queer visual culture, Queer Critical Literacies, and gender and sexuality studies in education, literature and film. My articles have been published in esteemed international journals including NORMA, Journal of African Cultural Studies and Education and Information Technologies. I worked as a member of research teams with lecturers from Wits University and collaborated with colleagues from local and international universities.
One of my learning and teaching innovations was developing the Queer Critical Literacies framework with Dr Navan Govender (Faculty of Education, University of Strathclyde, Scotland), which is used to more consciously work with classroom activities at all levels of education that deal with gender and sexuality diversity, particularly in literature, film and other multimodal texts. My recent research has looked at more effective ways to design online courses in diverse contexts, and I co-published two articles on this topic in 2022 with Dr Ilse Fouche.
I received a research grant from the National Research Foundation as sole researcher on a multi-year project on queer visual culture and queer identities in media, as well as a joint grant for a project on the scholarship of teaching and learning from the South African Department of Higher Education, exploring humanising online pedagogy.