Dennis Walder

Dennis Walder (1943-) is a Dickens scholar, theatre scholar, literary critic, editor and writer.

Biography

He was born in Cape Town on 7 February 1943, to Jean Walder (Zürich 1898 - Johannesburg 1957) and Ruth Liebenstein (Windhoek 1911 - Cape Town 1992). They ran the Grand Hotel in Muizenberg before and during the Second World War. After her divorce in 1947 Ruth married James Lodge (Lancaster 1915 - Cape Town 1996), a journalist on the Cape Argus and Pretoria News.

Education

He was educated at Bergvliet Primary, Cape Town and Pretoria Boys' High School. Then followed a BA.BComm (1964), University of Cape Town; MA (Hons) (1967) MLitt (1969) PhD on 'Dickens and Religion' (1979), University of Edinburgh, published as a book 1979, re-issued by Routledge in 2007.

Married to Frances Moodie Powell (1968 to 1974) and to Mary MacLeod (1979-). Children: Anna Ruth, Rohan James.

Career

He was a Research Fellow in English at the University of Edinburgh during the early 70s, while also teaching as an Assistant lecturer in English there (1969-1973). He thereafter became a Staff Tutor (Arts) at the Open University of Scotland, Edinburgh, (1974-1981), before joining the staff of the Open University at Milton Keynes, England, as Lecturer and Chair of the popular Open University Nineteenth-Century Novel course (1981-1988), as senior lecturer English (1989-1999) and finally as professor and head of department (1999 - 2010). He was appointed as Emeritus Professor of Literature in 2010.

Over the period of his employment at the Open University he introduced Athol Fugard and postcolonial texts to Open University curriculum, created a Postcolonial Literatures Research Group and was a director of The Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies.[1]

He was also a presenter of educational radio and television programs for the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Contribution to SA theatre, film, media and/or performance

Besides having acted as external examiner for many South African studies, and supervised studies on South African theatre, he is a founding member of the editorial board of the South African Theatre Journal, and is Co-editor of the Journal of Southern African Studies.

Among his key publications have been the books Post-Colonial Literatures: History, Language, Theory (1998), Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Memory and Representation (2010) and Athol Fugard, as well as three volumes of Fugard plays, edited for Oxford University Press.

In 2013 he gave the Wertheim Lecture in Comparative Drama at the University of Indiana speaking on “The Play’s the Thing: A Journey through the Drama of South Africa”

Author of an article on "Athol Fugard" in Middeke, Schnierer and Homann(2015).

All Dennis Walder's South African theatre papers - not only those regarding Fugard, but also a number on other local black playwrights, including the late Kole Omotoso - were donated to the University of Indiana (Bloomington) as an archive in 2013 and accessed by the Lilly Library in 2014. (See the library entry at: https://iucat.iu.edu/lilly/14690854).

See the ESAT Bibliography section for more on his publications.