Deirdre C. Byrne is a Professor of English and the former head of the Institute for Gender Studies at the University of South Africa (Unisa). She is an editor of the academic journal, scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa and a former editor of Gender Questions. She is the director of ZAPP (the South African Poetry Project). Her research focusses on the representation of gender in literary texts, especially in speculative fiction and in women’s poetry. She belongs to the steering group of an international research project on gender and love and is the co-investigator of an NRF-funded research project into South African poetry
