Stephanie Bosch Santana is a doctoral candidate in African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She received her B.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley (2005) and her A.M. in English from Harvard (2010). Her work focuses on Postcolonial and Anglophone World Literatures, with a specialization in African and African diasporic literatures in English and African Languages.
Her current project on transnationalism in southern African literatures seeks to reconnect South African literature, which is more frequently considered through an international lens, to the literatures of the surrounding region, in particular Malawian, Zambian, and Zimbabwean literatures. Specifically, this project explores the intra-African migration and transformation of the genres of fiction that have been developed through various serialized media—literary journals, popular magazines, newspapers, and increasingly, digital versions of these forms—and reads them in relation to more ‘traditional’ genres, such as the novel. Drawing upon the growing field of inquiry into the relationship between South African and African American literature, which engages theories of Black Transnationalism and Black Atlantic studies more broadly, this project extends these inquiries beyond South Africa’s borders into the rest of the region. This allows us to see that while South African literature has directly influenced and been influenced by other southern African literatures, it has also served as an important filter for the spread of global cultures and literatures, and particularly of black transnationalism, throughout the region. Overall, her project hopes to demonstrate that reading at the scale of the region illuminates literatures and literary networks that are frequently obscured by other critical frameworks, providing a salient “alternate geography” for the study of transnational, multicultural, and multilingual literatures.
Stephanie lived and worked in southern Africa from 2005 – 2008 and is the assistant editor of The Face of the Spirit: illuminating a century of essays by South African women (2007) and co-editor of Winning Stories from the Malawian Girls’ Short Story Competition (2009). Stephanie has presented her work at various conferences, including the American Comparative Literature Association and the African Studies Association of the UK. She has also helped to organize the first, second, and fourth annual African Languages in the Disciplines conferences at Harvard. As a teaching fellow at Harvard, she has assisted with courses on African cultures, languages, and literatures as well as African history.