Isabel Hofmeyr

Early life and education Hofmeyr was born in 1953 in Potchefstroom in the Transvaal Province of the former Union of South Africa. She entered Rhodes University in 1972 and graduated in 1974 with a Bachelor of Journalism. After a year in London, England, where she did secretarial and clerical work, she returned to university in 1976, completing a one-year Honours degree in English at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). She remained in the Wits English department to pursue a Master of Arts, completed in 1979 with a thesis entitled "Mining, social change and literature: an analysis of South African literature with particular reference to the mining novel 1870–1920". She served stints as head of the African Studies department and as an assistant dean in the Wits Humanities Faculty, which she led as acting director in 2009.

Hofmeyr's second book, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (2004), traced the intellectual and spiritual impact of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress in various parts of Africa. It won the International John Bunyan Society's 2007 Richard L. Greaves Prize.

Other honours On 11 October 2017, Hofmeyr was inaugurated as a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa.