Professor Louise Bethlehem 

IAS Fellow at St Mary's College, January - March 2026

Contact Details

• Home Institution email:  louise.bethlehem@mail.huji.ac.il
• Durham email: TBC
• Durham Tel: TBC

Louise Bethlehem is Professor in the Department of English and the Program in Cultural Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She works on questions of history, historiography, political philosophy, political ecology, ethics and form arising from literary texts and other works of expressive culture, with a particular emphasis on apartheid-era and postapartheid South Africa.

As an early career scholar, Professor Bethlehem introduced the notion of the “rhetoric of urgency” into South African literary studies to describe the dominance of literary realism in committed writing under apartheid. She went on to explore how literary and political imaginaries facilitate or constrain one another in her 2006 volume, Skin Tight: Apartheid Literary Culture and Its Aftermath. Between 2001-2012, Professor  Bethlehem co-edited six volumes on South African literature, postcolonial theory, cultural studies in the global South, labor in Africa and violence/non-violence on the continent. These include the prizewinning special issue of Poetics Today, “South Africa in the Global Imaginary” (2001), republished in book form in 2004.

The importance of Professor Bethlehem’s work derives from her mobilization of discrete instances of cultural analysis to animate the history and historiography of much broader configurations and her elaboration of epistemologies attuned to the global South. Between 2014-2019, Bethlehem was Principal Investigator of the European Research Council project, “Apartheid — The Global Itinerary: South African Cultural Formations in Transnational Circulation 1948-1990.” The project took its bearings from the insight that the political signifier “apartheid,” together with works of anti-apartheid expressive culture generated in opposition to the apartheid regime, all circulated within global constituencies during the Cold War. She hypothesized that tracing these processes of circulation would provide new perspectives on struggles over racial equality outside the borders of South Africa. Her paradigm was repeatedly substantiated by a team of over twenty researchers working across a variety of media in contexts ranging from the liberal West, the Soviet Union, socialist Hungary and Cuba, the Middle East and decolonizing Africa. Professor Bethlehem co-edited three additional special issues emanating from the project (see its publications here).

Professor Bethlehem’s current research, supported by an Israel Science Foundation Grant (2022-2026), investigates speculative literary, cinematic and visual cultural works from the Middle East and Africa. It explores their complex interrelations with the histories out of which they arise on the one hand, and climate change, environmental justice and the Anthropocene, on the other. The project introduces a new analytic category, namely “rift futurism.” Its allusion to the Syrian-African rift carries a commitment to eco-materialist analysis that anchors the project conceptually and geographically. At the same time, the emphasis on futurism as literary and cultural form delimits the corpus under investigation.

The notion of “apartheid” as a political signifier has been central to Bethlehem's research across two decades. During her time at the IAS, she will take up the term anew in the context of a Major Project on ‘Climate Apartheid,’ in collaboration with Professor Andrew Baldwin (Geography), Dr Simona Capisani (Philosophy) and Dr Chris Szabla (Law). In one version of its emergence, the term “climate apartheid” has been attributed to Bishop Desmond Tutu. Bearing this provenance in mind, and informed by the eco-materialist orientation of her present work, Professor Bethlehem will examine how processes of dispossession, environmental injustice and their uneven remediation reflect local histories of racism in apartheid-era and post-apartheid South Africa. Her focus will be on works of literature and visual culture that foreground or problematize the role of infrastructure in these processes.

Events

TBC