Activism

Nadia served as President of PEN South Africa from 2017-2024. Alongside the PEN SA board and in collaboration with PEN International, she has worked to defend writers at risk, protect freedom of expression and support the South African literary landscape. In 2020 she initiated PEN SA’s podcast, ‘The Empty Chair’ featuring South African and American writers and activists where together, they spoke about literature, freedom of expression and social justice.

Read Nadia and Vice President Yewande Omotoso’s farewell letter here. 

Academia

In 2008 Nadia was awarded the University of Cape Town’s first doctorate in Drama for a pioneering thesis entitled, ‘Inherited Memories: Performing the Archive”. Her PhD focused on performative engagements with the archives of Apartheid Forced Removals in District Six-a neighbourhood from which her own family members had been removed.

Nadia’s research examines race, trauma, cultural memory, place, home, exile, creativity, resistance, and restitution through the lens of performance and ‘post-memory’.

An A.W. Mellon Fellow, Nadia has been a visiting scholar/artist at the University of California Berkley, at New York University and at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Between 2009-2016 she lectured at Queen Mary University of London and while there, was a recipient of the prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize as well as a major Arts and Humanities Research Council grant. Between 2018 and 2022 she was an Associate Professorship in the University of Cape Town’s Department of English Literary Studies. While there she taught across a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses, won the UCT’s 2020 Creative Arts Award, developed a postgraduate internship for PEN SA and started the English Literary Studies ‘The Writer’s Seminar’, a monthly salon where students are able to engage established South African writers. Her academic writing has appeared in The Drama Review, Wasafiri, the South African Theatre Journal, Social Dynamics, a Journal of African Studies, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies and she served on the Editorial Advisory Board for Cambridge University Press: The Cambridge University Encyclopaedia of Stage Directors and Directing.