Congratulations to Aaron Bartels-Swindells who recently earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in English with a certificate in Africana Studies and was promoted to Assistant Teaching Professor.

Aaron’s dissertation, “Impossible Realisms: Genre and Apartheid, 1902-1973,” closely reads texts by writers such as Sol Plaatje, Nadine Gordimer, and the short story writers of Drum magazine to offer a new understanding of the motive forces behind realist fiction in twentieth-century South Africa. He plans to revise his dissertation into a book about the history of realist and modernist fiction in twentieth-century South Africa.