Timothy Wright received his PhD from Duke University in 2012. He specializes in 20th century and contemporary global Anglophone and postcolonial literatures, South African literature, urban studies, and critical theory. He is the author of Mutant City: Johannesburg Imaginaries in Twenty-First Century Speculative Film and Fiction (2026) which addresses the profusion of speculative and experimental fictions anchored in twenty-first century Johannesburg: fantasy, urban noir, sci-fi, comic books, and more. Here is a description of the book.
His research is fundamentally focused on the question of how people imagine life from within the midst of ruins, whether these ruins be material, political, or philosophical. His recent articles have explored imaginings of “mutant” and other non-normative forms of life in post-apartheid Johannesburg, a disorderly, fragmented, and violent city that nonetheless seems to hold out the promise of future possibility.
Book
Wright, Timothy. Mutant City: Johannesburg Imaginaries in Twenty-First Century Speculative Film and Fiction. Wits University Press and NYU Press, 2026.
Articles
“Surviving the African Anthropocene: Dilman Dila’s Mutational Aesthetics.” Research in African Literatures 50:2 (2019): 142 – 157
“Melancholy Freedom: Movement and Stasis in Sibs Shongwe-La Mer’s Necktie Youth (2015). Journal of African Cinemas 11:3 (2019): 207 – 224.
Book Reviews
“A Formalist in the Trenches: Graham K Riach’s The Short Story After Apartheid.” Essay. Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies (2024). 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2024.2375837
Review of Jeanne-Marie Jackson. The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing. Princeton University Press, 2020. Comparative Literature 75:1 (March 2023)
“Apartheid’s Endless Itineraries.” Review-article of Remains of the Social, eds Maurits van Bever Donker et al. Wits University Press, 2017. Cultural Critique 115 (Spring 2022).
Forthcoming work
Wright, Timothy. “The Apartheid Undead: Vampirism and the End of Whiteness in Kenneth Kaplan’s Pure Blood.” In The Global Vampire, ed. Simon Bacon. Routledge, 2027 (Forthcoming).
Wright, Timothy. “Speculative Climates: Future Fictions, Present Estrangements.” In The Cambridge Companion to Modern South African Literature, eds. Andrew van der Vlies, Simon van Schalkwyk, and Jade Munslow Ong. Cambridge University Press, 2027 (Forthcoming).