Isabel Hofmeyr is a professor of African literature at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she was involved in setting up the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa. Her first monograph, “We spend our years as a tale that is told”: Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom (1994), was shortlisted for the Herskovits Prize. The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of “The Pilgrim’s Progress” (2004) won the 2007 Richard L. Greaves Award. She is currently working on textual circulation in the Indian Ocean region.