Gabeba Baderoon

Gabeba Baderoon is an associate professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, African studies, and comparative literature at the Pennsylvania State University, where she codirects the African Feminist Initiative. She is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently The History of Intimacy (Kwela Books, 2018).

Baderoon’s project at Radcliffe is a verse memoir of concussion titled “Autobiography of Sand: Relief Map of a Drifting Mind,” which draws on an archive of medical records, pain diaries, research on concussion, colonial diaries, and scholarship on the Cape landscape. Formally mirroring its subject, the manuscript is structured into fragments and hesitancies haunted by the creative journals she could not write for three years after her injury.

Baderoon holds a PhD in English from the University of Cape Town and is an extraordinary professor of English at Stellenbosch University. Her honors include the DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Poetry, the Elisabeth Eybers Prize, the University of Johannesburg Prize, residencies from the Bellagio Center and Civitella Ranieri, and three best book awards from the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Baderoon is the author of the monograph Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Post-Apartheid (Wits University Press, 2014) and coeditor, with Desiree Lewis, of the essay collection Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa (Wits University Press, 2021). Baderoon sits on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund. In 2023, she was the Sarah Baartman Senior Fellow at the University of Cape Town.