Sarah Nuttall

Sarah Nuttall is a South African academic and cultural critic who is professor of literary and cultural studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. She was director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research from 2013 to 2022. She has published widely about post-apartheid South Africa, including on topics in literary theory, cultural theory, urban theory, and aesthetics. Born in Durban, Nuttall is the daughter of Jolyon Nuttall, a journalist and newspaper manager; his father, in turn, was Neville Nuttall, a columnist, teacher, and close friend of Alan Paton's. Nuttall completed a bachelor's degree at the University of Natal and a master's degree at the University of Cape Town. Come of age at the height of apartheid, she was involved in anti-apartheid student politics while at university. In 1994, she completed her PhD at University of Oxford, where was supervised by Kate Flint, mentored by Liz Gunner, and funded by a Rhodes Scholarship. Between 1997 and 2001, Nuttall was a lecturer in the English department at Stellenbosch University. In 2001, she moved to the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) to join the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) as a senior researcher, a position she held until 2010. During this period, in 2003, the Mail & Guardian named Nuttall as one of five academics expected to "emerge as key figures in our public life over the next 10 years", in Nuttall's case as a "literature specialist... pushing the boundaries of social and cultural analysis". In 2011, Nuttall left Wits and WiSER to return, briefly, to Stellenbosch; she was appointed director of WiSER in early 2013. She said that at WiSER she would attempt to "desegregate the conversations, bringing in people around the table and making sure the conversations are as wide as possible". She served two terms as WiSER director, leaving the office at the and 2022. She retained her research position at the institute and remained a professor of literary and cultural studies at Wits.