Emeritus Professor David Johnson

Professional biography

I joined The Open University in 1999. In the 1980s, I completed a law degree and MA in English at the University of Cape Town, and then in 1992 a PhD at Sussex University. Before joining The Open University, I taught for five years in South Africa at the University of Kwazulu-Natal (Durban).

Research interests

My research interests include Post-colonial Literature and Theory, Southern African Studies, Law and Literature, Labour History, Shakespeare Studies, African Print Culture, and Travel Writing. I have written three monographs, Shakespeare and South Africa (Oxford University Press, 1996), Imagining the Cape Colony. History, Literature and the South African Nation (Edinburgh University Press/ UCT Press, 2012), and Dreaming of Freedom in South Africa. Literature between Critique and Utopia (Edinburgh Univeristy Press/ UCT Press, 2020); was the principal author with Steve Pete and Max du Plessis of Jurisprudence: A South African Perspective (Butterworths, 2001); and was the co-editor with Prem Poddar of A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English (Edinburgh/ Columbia University Press, 2005), with Caroline Davis of The Book in Africa: Critical Debates (Palgrave, 2015), with David Hutchinson of Stuart Hood. Twentieth-Century Partisan (Cambridge Scholars, 2020), with Henry Dee of 'I See You': The Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union of Africa, 1919-1930 (HiPSA Press, 2022), with Noor Nieftagodien and Lucien van der Walt of Labour Struggles in Southern Africa: The Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union of Africa, 1919-1949 (HSRC Press, 2023), and with Caroline Davis and David Finkelstein of The Edinburgh Companion to British Colonial Periodicals (2024). I was series editor with Ania Loomba of the Edinburgh University Press series Postcolonial Literary Studies, and am series editor of the ongoing Edinburgh University Press series Key Texts in Anti-colonial Thought.

Teaching interests

My teaching interests lie principally in Postcolonial Literature, and especially Southern African literature and history. However, during the last two decades, I have written Open University teaching material on a variety of writers, and across a range of periods and genres (Aristotle, Shakespeare, Swift, Goethe, Byron, Cugoano, Prince, Wedderburn, Bushman Folklore, Grassic Gibbon, post-apartheid poetry, Hughes, Calvino, CLR James, Salih, Le Guin, Ngugi and Gurnah). Some of this teaching material has been co-published: with Richard Danson Brown Shakespeare 1609: ‘Cymbeline’ and the ‘Sonnets’ (Macmillan, 2000); edited with Richard Danson Brown A Shakespeare Reader: Sources and Criticism (Macmillan, 2000); edited The Popular and the Canonical. Debating Twentieth-Century Literature 1940-2000 (Routledge, 2005); edited with Suman Gupta A Twentieth-Century Literature Reader: Texts and Debates (Routledge, 2005); and edited with Anita Pacheco The Renaissance and Long Eighteenth Century (Bloomsbury, 2012).